full day in the hot garage again and accomplished alot. Correct "sleeved" bolts came in from RDent so I was ready to make progress with assembly. I must say that i'm not totally happy with the written material out there. Even with the shop manual and the BB book, i'm still left agog when it comes to step by step procedures on complete reassembly. The shop manual covers part under "final drive" section, and covers part under "rear suspension" section, and so on. I'm all over the manual, checking one against the other and piecing together what must be done. The BB book gives excellent details on certain things as well and very helpful on certain "Parts" or "sections" of assembly, however back to my chief complaint = there is no one (1) single reference material for step by step reassembly, like what would be covered at the factory covering the building of the car from start to finish. Is there such a reference???
For example, the emergency brake "tree" i could have installed earlier, however i thought it would get in the way while installing the rear differential. Little did i know that it was a real BEAR to get in with rear diff in situ. Part of the problem was that i was missing the "spacer", so i ended up making one out of tubing to make a sleeve spacer. You can see it was probably missing from before because the frame appears bent inward from the bolt pulling together without the sleeve there to stop it.
It took a good hour to feed the bolt from under the rear diff, through the hole, through the spacer, through the tree base, and through the rear frame member hole. Reaching behind to get the nut on was tight between the frame and body of the trunk. Perseverance paid off and the job is completed. Another question i had during the operation was also left "unanswered" in either shop manual or BB book. The tree base is offset whereas you can turn it one way to get real close to rear frame member, or turn it around to get it more centered. I know the manual places the tree at the farthest back, however i observed that the tree swivel top seemed to "hit" the rear body trunk. I know it's only an 1/8 inch difference at most, but again, no specific directions or discussions in the reference materials to go by.
I assembled the rear strut with new shock insert and compressed the springs. Another problem surfaced with my spring compressors interfering with the upper body cavity. There's very little room between the spring sides and the body up there, so i had to have the spring compressors closer together, as opposed to being located on direct opposite sides. it made the spring crooked during compression and more challenging to get it all together. It's a two man job, and the three of us (me, myself, and I) did it by ourselves. Fun, fun!
While attempting the above, i quickly realized that pre-assembly of the hub, brake disc, roto-flex, drive shaft, and inner roto-flex was too heavy and bulky to handle, even with a jack under the assembly the assembled drive shaft was interfering with the lowered wishbone. So i ended up temporarily attaching the outer wishbone to the strut hub base to have better control while jacking and to minimize unnecessary movement. Well after a couple hours of playing around with different configurations, i managed to get the strut up into the locotone/resilient mountings, attached nut and continued. Again the reference materials don't tell you "when" to uncompress the springs? Do i keep them compressed while mounting the last roto-flex coupling or use a jack under the hub, or both?? No specific directions on this either.
so you can see my frustrations from a full day of working on it, but HEY! I got one side done, completely assembled. All roto-flex are tightened, but all the wishbone bolts and strut top are waiting for the weight of the car to better set the position nearest normal ride height and then torque the remaining fasteners.
here's the finished side, all together and ready for torquing.
Mother nature is turning up the heat this week each day, so hopefully i'll get more done tomorrow morning before it gets to hot to work.