December 10, 2005 - The Teardown

And so it begins.  I definitely dreaded the teardown.  Working on a 10 year old car was going to be dirty and hard, bolts were rusted and nuts were prime for rounding off.  My dad and I set out to start the teardown with that in mind.  We ran into a few problems but over all things went well.

I forgot to bring the camera so I didn't get as many pictures of the teardown as I wanted.  I don't know, are pictures of dirty, rusted parts interesting?  Maybe.

In order to get the car into a state that would allow us to install the turbos and intercooler the entire suspension and front bumper assembly needed to be removed.  So first things first, the tires had to be removed.  We loosened the front lugs and placed the front tires aside.  Next, the brakes needed to come off.  I hate this job because the calipers need to be hung to keep tension off of the brake line or the brake line can be removed but that's a pain.  We took the calipers off and used a piece of wire tie to hang them.  It's nearly impossible to hang them out of the way but we did the best we could.  We snaked the wire through a hole in the frame and secured it to the strut tower brace (a mistake that we'd later have to change).  As I looked at the bolts attaching the struts to the spindle I thought about what a joy they were going to be to remove.  I was right, a long breaker bar didn't help and we couldn't get a good angle because of the bumper.  The bumper was coming off anyway so now seemed like as good of a time as any.

Removing the bumper took some time.  The headlights and turn signals had to be removed first.  Ford used these great plastic clips to hold the lights in place.  I had to use a pair of needle nosed pliers to squeeze the clip while I simultaneously pulled the light housing out of it's place in the bumper.  After scratching up my hands in the crowded space surrounding the headlights I had both of them out.  The turn-signals were much easier.  A couple of 10mm bolts held them in place and my handy 1/4" drive ratchet made quick work of them.  Now, how the heck does that bumper attach to the rest of the car?  Ah, some more plastic clips.  I removed all of the plastic clips but the bumper still felt securely connected to the car.  After some poking around with a flashlight I found 4 nuts that needed to be removed.  The one was rusted but it came off with a little bit of brute force and some BP blaster.  We slid the bumper off the car and placed it out of the way.

While I was messing around with the bumper my dad was busy heating up the strut to spindle nuts and bolts.  His trick worked, with the bumper removed and plenty of heat applied to the fasteners I was able to muscle the breaker bar enough to break the nuts loose.  We zipped them off with the air impact wrench and turned our attention to the top of the strut.  I grabbed the impact wrench again and blasted the top nut.

Removing springs is always tricky when you don't use a spring compressor.  We had a hydraulic jack under the stock a-arm and with the struts out of the way we hoped we could jsut lower the a-arm and the spring would flop out.  Of course that's not what happened.  We lowered the jack and shoved it aside, the spring extended but didn't fall out.  I gave my dad a crow bar and said, "Get after it old-timer."  Actually I never said that.  He grabbed the crowbar from a pile of junk and started poking and pulling the spring.  The rest of us watched from a safe distance as the spring sprung out.

As you can see in the picture above, the spindle needs to be removed form the a-arm ball joint.  In order to do this we needed a fork to separate the joint.  We disconnected the tie-rod without a problem but we didn't have a fork to separate the ball joint so we called it a day.