rainagain

The wheel arches were quite badly rusted inside and around the fuel filler. This all got wired brushed and vactan applied. Both of them had a hole at the top of the arch where a fixing for the arch liner used to sit. I don’t have a welder nor did I want to have to rip out all the sound deadening foam to weld it, so I bodged two small glass fibre patches to cover the holes. It was great fun having resin drip onto you as you try and apply it to a surface above your head.

I cleaned up the carriers, whilst doing this I found a shim had fallen off one of them. I don’t know which one it came from! Does anyone know what the function of the shim is and how to determine where it should go? After a good bit of wire brushing they were treated to vactan. And then black paint As I couldn’t put anything back together whilst waiting on the bump stops I also treated the chassis rails.

Saabits didn’t reply to my email so today I tried my local Dingbro, who despite selling me stuff in the past refused to sell me anything as I wasn’t trade. I then tried TMS motor spares in Rosyth. The good news is they can get my a new set of bump stops by the end of the week and they were only £18 the bad news was I had to pay the postage for them which was £14.50! This pothole is getting rather expensive! I got the other strut stripped down and luckily all the rubber parts are ok on it.

I split the strut with the knackered spring and bump stop tonight. I had some bother getting the part circled below off the old shock but I held the strut in a vice and used a heat gun to heat up the tube until I could remove it with some vice grips I still can’t seem to get bump stops from anywhere, I’ve emailed Saabits after I called both my local branch and the main contact number for eurocarparts as they couldn’t find anything. I can get them from eBay but they won’t be here until a weeks time. I’m going to see if I can remove the other bump stop and take a trip to my local eurocarparts to see if there’s anything in stock that’s close to it.

Thanks I’ll give him a try as eurocarparts customer service isn’t open tomorrow.

I got the struts both out tonight. However the side with the snapped spring has taken out it’s bump stop. I can find replacements on eBay but the delivery time is the 16th of January as is Amazon. Eurocarparts don’t have anything listed, but I’ll drop them a line tomorrow and see what they have.

Amazingly the top bolts all actually came out ok, my car is slightly more rusty than the one I saw in the guide online. My car Shiny car in guide The bottom bolt is done up to 190Nm and I’d managed to forget my breaker bar so this is as far as I got tonight. I should have done it earlier but I decided tonight I should really just replace the shocks as they look knackered. I almost bought the cheapest on eBay but instead settled on a pair of Monroes. Hopefully they’ll turn up soon. Tomorrow I’m going to remove both sides and split the struts apart.

Doesn’t time fly, finally made a start on sorting this tonight. That’ll be proper humped then. The spring also kindly broke in such a way the bottom bolt wasn’t accessible. I had to chop the spring with an angle grinder whilst it was under tension, it did made quite a large bang once I’d chopped through it.

My eBay spring turned up tonight! That’s fast service, there’s not much difference between sport and normal suspension so I’m just going to fit them rather than waiting for three weeks. If I’d gotten round to sorting the focus I wouldn’t be in so much of a hurry. I don’t suppose you know if the top nut is metric fine? I’d rather chop the nut off to save the shock.

Which scrappy is that? I wouldn’t mind grabbing both washer pumps and connector plugs to splice into the currently hack about wiring, as it’s missing the rear pump.

Then driving home later that night I hit one of the many potholes and heard a bang, then the car got a lot more bumpy. I looked round the rear and found it had gone low rider on me. yeps that’s a broken spring I found a pair on eBay, annoyingly they didn’t have anything listed for sports suspension which according to the vin decoder this car has and which makes sense as it’s the ‘Sport’ model. Just after I’d ordered them I checked autodoc and found not only did they list the sports springs but they were also cheaper. Grr. At least the ones from eBay should arrive quite soon. As I now have two broken cars including my neglected Focus.

I had an appointment in the nearby big smoke (Edinburgh), I’d booked parking through JustPark, I didn’t realise to get to the car park I had to squeeze my very long car into a very small lift. Luckily for me two guys having a smoke near the entrance helped me get into the lift, at first like me they didn’t actually think I was going to fit. I gave it a wash the day before and even with my crap parking as I was running late due to the lift I still think it’s a good looking car. To get out the car park there was instructions on the wall showing the necessary reversing manoeuvre. I did feel like Austin Powers but I eventually managed it.

-6 here this morning in Fife, not much actual snow just a lot of thick ice.

Without wanting to tempt anything this has been doing the job of being car really well recently. One thing that was annoying was the swirl flap bar kept falling off. I ordered a new one from ebay for just under £11 delivered. I unclippped the glow plug connectors to give me some more room to allow me to extract the old control rod. Comparing it to the new one I found the little O rings which help hold it onto to the flaps had I assumed disintegrated. I was in such a hurry trying to get the old one out I didn’t realise it was handed and I couldn’t remember which way it was originally sitting. I put some silicon grease in each of the new bushes and after some faffing getting the flaps all aligned I was able to install the new rod. I was quite pissed off that after I installed it I found the little screws screwing the bushes to the rod were mostly all a bit loose. It was a bit of a PITA tightening them with it installed, however I’m glad I spotted them before the screws fell out. A few drives later it’s still where it should be so I’m calling that a win.

Really interesting write up, it's good(?) to see that others are having problems stopping the ginger returning and it's not just me. I used Vactan on the tow bar of my 307 and never got round to top coating it and it held up fine, however I used it to treat the rust on the arches of my saab early this year and rust is already starting to come back through.

Whilst fighting the urge to bridge it…

Yep time to get brutal!

Other side already done thank fully

Sorry I miss typed that there is a captive nut welded to the subframe. If there was a nut I’d just chop it off and punch the bolt through.

I don’t even have a driveway it’s just grass and yes it’s shit. I could have done this on my dad’s drive but I thought a couple of wishbones, nothing I’ve not done before and it shouldn’t be too bad…

Def is a captive nut as I’ve already changed the other side and it’s just a bolt.

A pocket lighter and five litres of petrol seem more appealing. The worst thing is in my head I think I’m still in less than the scrap price so every day I’m more and more tempted to have it taking across the bridge.

The other side was a piece of piss compared to this one and is already changed. Problem is if I cut it out I won’t have anything to undo the bolt with. I don’t have a welder to weld a nut to it.

I think I’m going shove a heat gun in the space and keep an eye on the cv boot above it.

Picked up some nice new 1/2” drive impact sockets from Halfords and set to remove the wishbone bolt. My Aldi gun still can’t touch it. However joys upon joys the bolt is undoing but the insert for the bush is stuck to the bolt. As you undo it it feels like it’s going to rip the subframe apart. As you can see the head is barely proud of the subframe so rather than just undoing, the metal inset from the bush is pushing the subframe mounting out of shape. I’m not sure if I should keep undoing it and hope as some point the insert will release from the bolt or will it burst open the subframe? I can’t really get heat in here as the cv boot sits right above this. I’m tempted to see if I can break the insert up with a cold chisel.