Suspension

If you had to invent a fixing that was specifically designed to rust and become all but useless, I think you’d be hard pressed to come up with anything that beats a weedy, little split pin. Especially when that weedy, little split pin is sitting in a blast of road grime. Sadly there are castle nuts & split pins aplenty on the rest of the suspension. Trying to straighten the tails of the split pins and pull them out just results in the heads cracking due to rust damage, so I resort to snapping the heads and tails off with a little metal fatigue.

I also quickly learnt a new lesson: scrub the threads of the bolt with a wire brush before attempting to remove the nut.

Anyway, I get the all the wishbone pivot nuts loose, remove the outer pivot and off comes the wishbone and spring pan, ready to be re-united with the spring from earlier.

I’m not quite sure what happened with separating the taper joint on the steering arm. Not having a ball joint splitter to hand, I’d tried the double-hammer technique, the single-hammer technique and the cursing-loudly technique to no avail. I popped round to the nearside to start tackling some of the suspension jobs, then came back to fiddle with the offside kingpin only to spot that the joint had come loose while I wasn’t looking!

I’m not keen on going through all that again on the nearside, but luckily I’m able to borrow a splitter from a friend.