Mr. Mike" Passaretti says:
>
>
> I need an honest assesment from the list. I've got to re-bush
> Sonja's front end, and while I'm there I'm going to do ball
> joints, shocks and springs. I have all the parts. How long
> will this take me (i.e. can I really make it to Savannah?).
> I've got a fair amount of wrenching experience, and no special
> tools (as in I'll have to have someone else do the pressing).
> I can (maybe) find someone in the area who does this sort of
> thing 8 hours a day to do it and throw some money at the
> problem, but I don't want to if I don't have to. Any comments
> or opinions? Am I _likely_ to have to do trunnions?
I just did the complete front end on my MkI sprite (bugeye) so this may or
may not have any correlation to how much work is involved with the TR4A.
First here is what I did:
Added front tube shock conversion
reinforced lower A arms with welded bits of cold steel
Added front anti sway bar
Replaced all bushings with urethane
Used a new rebuild kit for front suspension to replace almost all
parts
Replaced steering rack boots and knuckles
Rebuilt brake calipers
Now I worked kinda slow. I wanted to be as meticulous as possible, and I
spent a lot of time just "cleaning and scrubbing" the 30 years of accumulated
road crud off the various pieces and underside. I would extimate that I
spent about 14 hours just scraping off crud. With this noted, let me tell
you there is now a good sized cardboard box in some dump filled with oily
dirt and rocks that were on my car.
I spent about 8 or 9 real hours tearing the front end apart. A lot of this
time was spent assessing if old parts could be reused after a chem dip and
repaint.
After everything was taken off I went to work cleaning off rust and thicker
crud from the springs, A-arms, lever shocks, brakes, and bolts I was going to
reuse. This took about 5 hours of swork.
I shipped out the rebushing of the king pins, but I helped out the shop on
the reassembly, this took about 3 hours for the rebushing, assembly, and
welding of A-arms.
For putting everything back together, I decided to do one side at a time, I
had a bunch of Sprite Midget Owners Group (SMOG) members come over to help
with the reassembly and part fabrication for the antisway bar and tube shock
stuff. In 6 hours of casual working (lots of talking and looking at car mags
and discussions about how to improve what etc) the 6 of us completed the
drivers side. I did the passenger side myself in about 2 1/2 hours.
I then spent a few more hours cleaning up the underside and other bits from
the cowl foward. Basically I wire brushed the car down, cold galvanized,
primered, rustoleum enameled, and on the headers I used barbeque paint (seems
to be sticking so far).
So You can see that I spent a lot more time than necessary to rebuild the
front end on the bugeye, but now it looks really nice. It drives really nice
too.
--
Miq Millman -- miq@sgi.com or {decwrl,pyramid,att}!sgi!miq 415 390 1041
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