An ongoing tale of learning from mistakes,
mostly those of other people!
Part the third
Shake-down!
Well we took the beast out to play as a reward for our endeavours, you can probably see the results elsewhere on this site or on youtube.
Surprisingly the car acquitted itself very well, sure we had flaky front brakes and a soggy back end (ooerr!) but all in all a good day out.
Back to it:
We re-indexed the rear end by two splines and the car now sits much better, albeit with a slight positive camber attitude but that’s the price you pay for increased ride height on a swing-axle car.
Rarrr!
The front beam was removed and inspected, there was a little bit of corrosion on the lower section of the off-side tower so we decided to use the perfect beam from the 1970 car.
Sway-away type adjusters have now been welded into place on both torsion tubes…..sorry forgot to take any pictures.
Rather than weld them in allowing for equal adjustment up and down they were fixed to allow all the adjustment in the up direction only (rotating the trailing arms down – lifts car up).
We now have up to four inches of front-end lift…..kick-ass!
The limiting factor to lift however is the length of the front shock absorbers, they are jammed at full extension, not a good thing - when replaced with longer-travel ones the front end of the car will rise higher…..nice!
Useful tip - While we had the beam in bits we also installed some urethane torsion bar bushes, these replace the needle bearings (and seals) in the end of the tubes and hopefully will be better suited to our application.
We encountered just one problem during fitting of the urethane, removal of the old needle bearings – this was solved with a bit of lateral thinking, we used a really big-ass rawl-bolt, the kind used to secure bridges to motorways etc. it proved much easier to pull out the bearings than collapse them inwards using pointy things and a hammer.
See below:
Rawl-bolt remover
Rawl-bolt remover expanded
Rawl-bolt remover in place
Bearing on its way out
Urethane bushings fitted
Beam in place on car
Hard!
Front and rear raised – Cool
The next job is to fit four new balljoints as most of our existing stock of used ones have torn rubber boots.
We have assembled the front end using these duff joints purely to get the vehicle mobile – we don’t expect them to last long off-road when they have been exposed to muck and grit but we might as well give them a good send-off……..
New balljoints are cheap to buy and therefore it makes perfect sense to replace them while the front end is being worked on.
However, before we can fit them we need to build a suitable press to extract the old ones and press in replacements.
I have a stash of sturdy steel beam at work and a 10-ton bottle jack which should make a really effective press………..more as I build it.
Following on from balljoint replacement is the fitment, of front disk brakes and calipers, these have been saved from the 1970 1500 we broke previously and will need checking over first.
Future plans include fitting a Golf 1.9 TDi motor which will be liberated from Man-John’s Golf before it is scrapped.
The logic behind this conversion is two-fold, the engine will have over twice the power of the 1200 it replaces at 90bhp and also plenty of torque for turning those big rear wheels.
It will not be adversely affected by water as it has no HT (spark) ignition system.
An added bonus is it can be run on cooking oil as a rolling experiment before I dare to try it in a family car…….might even use recycled oil from local chippies.
We will detail removal of engine from donor Golf and also fitting into Beetle as we go.
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