May 29, 2006 - More problems: The Front
Suspension and the Fuel Pump Saga (2)
Here's the strut assembly installed.
Unfortunately when we were tightening the spindle to A-arm nuts we
over-tightened one of them and stripped it. That pretty much
put an end to continuing the driver side brake installation.
We also noticed that this bracket was touching the strut.
We bent it slightly, and it cleared without a problem.
The passenger side proved to be a little more difficult. As
I picked up the threaded sleeve and tried to screw on the lower
spring perch I immediately noticed a problem. The perch
wouldn't thread onto the sleeve. This is how far I could get
it before the threads bound up and I couldn't move it.
As I inspected the two items more closely I could see that
something was wrong with the threads. There were marks on the
sleeve which lead me to believe that one of the threads was incorrect.
I thought it was probably the spring perch.
We couldn't go any further, with the suspension install but there
was plenty of time left in the day so I grabbed the pinion snubber.
Maximum Motorsports recommends replacing the stock snubber with
their after market snubber on all lowered cars. The first thing I needed to do was remove the old one. Dodging
falling, dried mud was the only challenge in the removal. I
tried to clean up the bracket a little bit, but I gave up when it
wasn't going as quickly as I wanted and I convinced myself that no
one was going to see it anyway. Here's the old and new snubber.
At that point we had done everything we could. I would call
the place I bought the fuel pump from and get a new one sent and I'd
also call Maximum Motorsports and get a new spring perch. All
in all it was a pretty frustrating weekend. I ran into two
unexpected delays and I wasn't happy about it.
