A major milestone has been passed: The front trailing links are inatalled.
Tht torsion bar tubes where last of the original big problems to be addressed. The car had been sitting for decades with the front torsion bars out. Therefore the grease had to be cleaned out and the inside condition assessed.
Cleaning out the grease was a messy job, for which I made a couple fo scrapers and ultimately made a looped tool which I coud thread a length of terry cloth. With that I got the tubes relatively clean. Old grease looks just like new grease, there was no water, and the inside of the tubes was excellent-no rust. I used a shortened brromstick to center the center block and got the set screw in to hold it, then backed it out so as to be able to slide the torsion bar through.
I had made a tool to pull the bearings out three years ago and pulled them then. I planned to push them back in after a thorough cleaning of the ends of the tubes, and of course the bearings. For that I machined an aluminum pusher so I could hammer on the pusher if I met resistance, but with everything clean I wasn't expecting much.
But the first, the upper right, stalled about 1/3 of the way in. The uper left stalled about half way. Those are the original flanged bearings, in good shape, and hitting them harder looked like trouble. So that was the end of that days work and on to plan B. Plan B was to draw the bearings in, as I had drawn them out.
I made the drawbar the easy way, I bought a 6' piece of 1/2 x 13 all-thread, two coupling nuts, four large steel washers, and machined another aluminum pusher. I machined the end of the coupling nut flat. The pusher was center drilled and bored 1/16" deep to center the larger steel washer.
There's a lot that could go wrong with that setup: The nut could gall on the washer, the nut could gall on the threads, the all- thread could turn with the nut, the nut on the other side could turn, etc.
Armed with all the tools needed to cover any eventuality, and puting my faith in moly grease, I headed over the hill to Bonny Doon to do battle with the torsion tubes. The all-thread went through the center block and all the way across. I centered the pusher, greased everythig, and threaded on the coupling nut. I went across to the hard side, and put the other pusher on. As I snugged the nut up with the 11/16 box wrench, I put a little more torque on it and the nut turned rather easily! I checked, no the rod wasn't turning, the nut was actually threading down. With practically no effort, the far side, the easier side pulled in. Then with a little more effort, the near side moved, but with stiction. But that side pulled in easily too. Just like that both bearing were seated. The lower tube bearings went even easier. Sometimes I get lucky.
After checking the fit of the trailing arms, I slid the torsion bars in, snugged up the center set screw, and installed the trailing arms.
The picture shows the tools I used in order from left to right.
- IMG_0295 F Torsion Tube Tools.jpg (1.87 MiB) Viewed 3431 times