I know this is an older post, but I wanted to give you an idea of what I did many years ago when the Cal Look rage was going on in the 80's. I am back into VW after 22 years of Mopars, yes I still love the A and B bodies with their big blocks.
What you can do, remove the both IRS trailing arms and mount them on the oposite sides, it will mount upside down of course. IRS trailing arms do have a small degree of built-in camber, but your lower shock mounts will need to be cut off, you would see that as soon as you bolted it in. Then after you cut it off, trim it to fit and weld it back on, I would prefer TIG over MIG, but you could weld it with the MIG.
Use the later '73 and up single spring plate and notch it like the swing axle would be. With the IRS setup, you can not hurt the wheel bearings because its self contained and the CV shaft will handle more of an angle then a swing axle can. Think of some of those off-road Baja bugs with 15"-22" of wheel travel, you get the idea.
If it were my ride, I would get another set of late trailing arms to modify. Many out there will say they don't like it because there isn't any major tucking of the top rear wheels. Its a trade off, or you switch to Swing Axle setup its an easy swap-out and go from there.
This modification is reversible if you use a donor set of late model arms. Think of it this way, you will have more tire contact with the road, and it will handle like it is on rails.
I did this back in 1986 when I dropped a '67 Euro bug body onto my '70 IRS pan. I was very happy with the results.
Thanks,
Danny
Subject: Re: MY NEW 53 AKA SPLOVAL 
Tue Sep 30, 2008 11:01 am
