My first struggle was with the lower control arms. The bearings on the pivots want to fall apart. There is an inner sleeve that is wider than the pivot point. On either side of each pivot point, there are three concentric rings that rest on the edges of those sleeves. The inner ring is basically a washer. The outer ring is just a metal ring. The in-between ring is a rubber grease seal. These four sets (two pivot points per arm and two sets of rings per pivot point) balanced precariously as I tried to slowly insert the heavy assembly into the housing. There are also large washers that go outside of those seals while the 16” axle gets inserted through both pivot points. It is a job for someone with six hands. I managed to hold one side reasonably together, squeezed in the big washers and inserted the axle. The other side had to be reassembled in a tight space. Luckily there is some flex in the housing that allowed me to pry open some room while I gently inserted the concentric ring assembly, a tedious process requiring about a dozen tries before achieving success. When I moved to the second control arm, I saran wrapped the assemblies together. I am not sure I got all the saran wrap out, but I don’t think that will present a problem.
After that, I was able to motor along, bolting the axles down which sandwich the rotors. The next step was installing the new springs/struts. I realized that I was going to have to turn the assembly sideways on my dolly as the arms drop down too low for the way I had things oriented. This means I will have to slide the stationary wheels of the dolly sideways to move the assembly under the car, but the weight is mostly on the smaller pivoting wheels so I can probably just pick up the back of the dolly with the jack and roll the entire thing sideways. I suspected this was going to be necessary, but I wasn’t sure until I started to put on the springs.
Luckily, I realized that prior to pushing the pivot axle for the springs forward, I had to install the new radius arms. Those cannot be tightened until they are fully connected to the car and the car is sitting level, but the bolt has to go in before the front spring, another of those crazy thoughtless bolting details. There were a few washers in the mix of all these pivots that I wasn’t entirely sure about, but the number and sizes worked out logically. If you look in the picture below, you can see the radius arm (bungeed up to keep from scraping on the concrete) pivots are tucked behind those front springs.
Yesterday was supposed to be an easy day. I just needed to fabricate a few brake lines and install the calipers and handbrakes. Installing the calipers turned out to be a nightmare, even worse than taking them off. I think one problem is that the holes did not precisely align with the mounting bracket holes (I’ll blame the Chinese calipers for that). I was able to force the first one together, but that meant that the bolts were tight the entire way, a quarter turn at a time. Over half the turns had to be done with an open-end wrench because there was no clearance for a box wrench. I am glad I didn’t buy that set of Gear Wrenches I looked at the other day as those were too thick to fit in there until the end. I had two box wrenches of the right size in my collection and only the thinner one was really useful. I opened up the hole a little on the second caliper, but then ran into another problem. I managed to get the lower bolt to engage, but then the caliper wouldn’t rotate far enough to line up the second hole. I ended up grinding off a part of the caliper housing that was bottoming out and then finally jammed the bolt into the hole and repeated the quarter-turn-at-a-time joy of the first one. If you look at the picture, the mounting bolts are on the inside of the calipers behind the cylinder. The work is jammed between the caliper and the differential. There is so little room to work in there that the bolt cannot be removed until the caliper is pulled out.
I really didn’t understand how the handbrakes work until I began to assemble them. The first thing I ran into, though, was the realization that the stupid routing originally used for the driver’s side brake line was because of the handbrake lever. I now have to fabricate a new brake line for that side. I looked at the two points and chose the easiest routing, a foolish mistake. It seems every line I have fabricated has required repeating the process. The first set of crossover lines couldn’t be re-used with the new longer fittings because the first bend was too close to leave room for the flare tool (flare before bending).
The handbrakes are weird, for sure, but they aren’t as bad as I thought. They were merely a minor hassle to assemble and I think there is a chance that they might work OK. I didn’t want to adjust them too tightly, but they do seem to open on both sides when the tension on the arm is released. The old springs aren’t actually terrible, but they do need to be tightened up so I will probably try to bend those to tighten them. If they break, I can buy some new springs and fabricate them to the correct length.
With as much cleanup as I have done, I thought the assembly work would be relatively clean, but I seem to always grab a dirty spot that I missed. The anti-seize didn’t help me stay clean either, especially when I dropped a small bolt into the jar and had to fish it out. My hands are raw from constant washing and my Gojo is running low.
