Rolling Chassis
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With the front uprights and hubs already assembled and the bushes in the rear wishbones repositioned to clear the rims the suspension was on the car very quickly once the Nitron dampers had arrived. Have to say that despite the extended wait I am very pleased with these dampers. The build quality is excellent and I am sure that they will perform as well as they are reputed to. Weight wise a complete front damper with spring is 2.05Kg, which is probably at least a couple of Kg per unit less than the Spax units, so another 8kg shaved off the car.
When fitting the 8.5" wide rear wheels I found that the inner edge of the rim was fouling the springs under full droop. It was necessary to space the wheels out by 16mm in order to prevent them fouling the springs.
The rear suspension went on very quickly and fortunately the location of the rear uprights with the bushes pushed in still enabled the top of the upright to bolt to the upper wishbone. Phew, didn't think of this and don't fancy pushing those bushes about again it. The rear of the car suddenly seemed very wide...
The diff was fairly easy to fit albeit a little fiddly getting washers between the mounts and transmission tunnel panel and it needed a little persuasion with long bit of wood to get all of the bolt holes to line up...Before fitting this I fitted new oil seals to the output shafts and drained the old oil out. I pushed the inner tripod joint shafts in to keep the dust and any other shite that was building up around my feet out. Fitting the diff also enabled me to measure the distance between the tripod joints in order to get the half-shafts made to the correct length. The tip-to-tip measurements for my car were 355mm N/S and 394mm O/S.
With front suspension was slightly less easy as I has incorrectly cut the side panels out (see chassis panelling) and had to rise to the challenge of fitting the rocking arms. The nylon top hat bushes are an interference fit in the rocking arms and are simply pushed in with a rubber mallet. As supplied the CDS tube does not fit into the nylon bushes and is too long. As explained in the build manual it was necessary to ream out the nylon bushes with a strip of emery cloth wrapped around a bolt with a slot cut in it. I suspect that there is quite an art to getting the fit of the CDS tube into the nylon bushes just right - i.e. not too stiff and absolutely not loose at all. I found that the CDS tube was eventually quite a loose fit into either top hat bush, but would become very tight when trying to push it right through both bushes. I imagine that this is due to the fact that I did not ream them out exactly in line with each other. After much reaming and testing I found that I could _just_ push the CDS tube right into the nylon bushes by hand. Each CDS tube was positioned in line with the outer surface of one nylon bush and then I began to file down the length of CDS tube until one end protruded by 0.2-0.5mm from the nylon bush. This required careful filing in order to ensure that it was absolutely square with nylon bush. I tried measuring the length of CS tube protruding. With a steel rule it was definitely less than 0.5mm and looked bloody small - so small in fact that it was very easy to see that it was square by eye. I was really worried that I had filed too much off or that the CDS tube would be too loose or too stiff so the only way to find out was to fit one. In order to help keep everything moving freely I liberally oiled the CDS tube in some gear oil (from the diff) and fitted the assembly onto the chassis. I torqued this bolt up to 60 ft.lb and to my immense relief the rocker arm moved freely but was not loose at all and did not move fore-aft. The other side was attached in the same manner and then the suspension was quickly assembled. Followed by the steering rack and track rod ends. I didn't spend any time with the suspension setup at this time, as you can tell by the huge amounts of negative camber and toe out, but I was keen to push it out into the Spring sunshine.
With the chassis back inside the garage I supported the rear uprights on axle stands and got my brother-in-law to sit on each end to put some load into the suspension to get it around half-way compressed in order to torque up all the suspension bolts without putting excess strain on the bushes under normal operation. It is still possible to lift both the front and rear of the car off the ground!
I then pushed the chassis back out onto the drive, thinking how convenient the slope would be when I had no reverse and set about sweeping up the piles of swarf, offcuts and empty boxes. I filled 5 bin-bags and the car was put back to bed in a clean garage.