The front end has been disassembled down to the inner fenders. The parts I’ve removed so far like the fenders, bumper, brackets, headlight and all are stowed away in the loft area of my garage. They will be tended to later.
It’s time to address the front suspension. As I noted before, the bushing area all worn out. Every piece of the front-end has some sort of play in it. I looked through the various catalogs and realized that a complete rebuild kit was only a hundred dollars more than the bushings alone. A kit provides new upper and lower arms and sway bar bolts, plus all the bushings I need to replace. I found one on EBay and saved about $20, shipping was more so I only save a few dollars.
Removing the shock, spring and brake caliper was simple enough, but that’s where simplicity ended.
The castle nuts on the ball joints were missing the cotter pins. Not to worry though the nuts were tightened so well it took a substantial amount of brute force with a 3 lbs hammer to break them loose. My impact hammer would not fit in the small space between the top and bottom of the spindle. Once the castle nuts where loose I was able to pop the upper ball joint out easy enough but the lower one wasn’t going anywhere. After hours of attempting to free it I decided I could just remove the lower arm and then free it from the spindle. HA! I was mistaken. Some brilliant ‘mechanic’ before me put the bolt at the pivot point in backwards. This meant that the bolt would have to be removed from the rear side and the nut was onthe front side. Unfortunately, the front cross-member provides an excellent barrier and prevents this from happening. The drivers side is installed correctly, so I’m hoping things will go better when I work on it. I eventually dropped the passenger side of the cross-member only to have the Flaming River rack and pinion provide another block. It took three days, working off and on to get it all removed.
Here’s the final result. No supension left on the passenger side. Now I can clean it up. Treat the rust and paint it.
