I needed some stuff and I gave the last $27 to my friend to pay for the Red Primer chassis paint that came in Friday. I went to the money machine and got to thinking of what I needed for tomorrow to prep the chassis for some touch up on the welded area and a few holidays I left, plus I ran out and did half of the inner front rail in I.H. Red as I wasn?t leaving it bare when I ran out of the Red Primer. Anyway I needed to scuff up the area to be repainted and I thought I needed some more lacquer thinner so I headed out, I took the Elan as the pickup was low on fuel and so was the Elan but it was nice out so that decided it. I stopped at a place called Autozone (chain store auto parts) and looked at there urethane bushing section and saw they had 5/8 sway bar bushes and for $7 so I picked up a pair. Then stopped at Lowes and got the scotchbrite to scuff the paint with and they didn't have lacquer thiner so I got a gallon of acetone. I then got Gas for the ?lan and headed over for my friends 60th birthday party to eat all I could. When I got home I figured it was a good time to install the bushes and to see if I remembered how. I got out the hammers and sockets and had a go; first hit was a good one and hit my hand. Not looking good I thought. Well things got a bit better and I got one on and checked it and I was good for the second one. I got the camera out and figured I would try and show you my method. Sorry I missed getting a photo of the 24 oz ball peen hammer hitting my hand but you can laugh along anyhow..
First the bush is pushed into the link and then set over the end of the sway bar. I used a 1 inch socket to use to hit on the link, the 1 inch seemed to grab the urethane bush and hold it in place nicely. I start this dry with no lube as if you lube it, it just pops back off.
Once its part way on you can lube it but I like to get it a bit further on so the socket was put back on and I gave it a couple more hits with the 24 oz ball peen.
At this point the 1 inch socket was too small so I got the 1 1/8 Socket to clear the end of the sway bar. This is where the socket is starting to drive the link over the urethane so it time to stop and go to the next step and that is to lube the bar with a drop or so of dish washing detergent.
lubing the bar
just a drop is visible, I added some more to make it slide nicely at this point
Beau says nice job, its 5:00 and its dinner time. total time just about 1 hour.
April 2nd 11:45 am
This morning started out with a couple of kind of clean racks, One LHD Spitfire rack that Dave had given me a couple years ago that was a spare from when he raced an 64 Spitfire. The other rack was from my RHD 70 Coupe that I had converted to LHD so I didn?t really need it and I really didn?t want to convert 26/4020 to a RHD so Engineer Beauregard said to me ?just geter dun?, so that?s what we did this morning. I stripped down both racks to the basics and then preformed some VOODOO mumbo-jumbo type of ceremony with wrenches and other implements like a grinder and hammers to make it so. Anyway its ready for some black paint now and the ?two bit whore? is one step closer to being a chassis again.
April 3rd 1:30am
The sun came out yesterday afternoon and so did the spray gun, The sway bar needed touching up and the rack needed painting so I did some sand blasting on the other sway bar and a few other parts to make it worth while to clean the spray gun after and made some parts semi-gloss black.
I woke up early so I figured I would have coffee and put the boots on the rack. The pinion end is easy, but I never liked sliding the boot over the inner tie rod. I had the first coffee and thought about it and decided that a pair of soup spoons seemed better than the two screwdrivers I have used in the past. Sad to say it worked out sweet, after about 30 seconds of fussing with it I was done. A picture of things as it is at the moment.