Sunday 24 April 2011

Raising the suspension & fitting the new turbo - Part Two

A trip to Demon Tweeks

We made good time travelling down to Demon Tweeks in Wrexham and things looked promising upon arrival with acres of racing goodies on view. Full racing suites, steering wheels, engine pipes, crash helmets and more gauges than a power station. Surely this would have a few poxy oil attachments and a few other adaptors.

After a few minutes queuing it was our turn at the counter, we presented the sales assistant with our puzzle. 'Have you got an adaptor that will fit between this adaptor and this oil pipe' (drops a load of oil on the floor). The guy behind the desk started to flick through numerous books full of adaptors and pipe fittings. 'I'll be back in a minute'.

After a few minutes he was back looking puzzled and called over the manager, we explained our problem again, whilst dropping more oil on the sales floor and got a glazed look and a sharp intake of breath. 'What's that off mate?' This was not looking good. We felt like saying it Frankenstein's monster but told him what we knew, 'it's for a Renault 5 but has some internals from a Nissan SR20'.

After a lot of scratching of heads and numerous looks of 'are you mental?' it appeared that we were not going to get what we wanted.  A large queue of people buying steering wheels and race shoes was forming behind us, it was time we stopped wasting everyone's time with our impossible shopping list, wiped the oil off the floor and counter and got back to ponder our next steps.

On the way back we had the bright idea of, 'if we can't buy a part we'll make one' and dropped into Screwfix in Warrington to buy a tap & die set. Time was now getting on after our lame attempts at Demon Tweeks and getting lost in Warrington. Finally we got home around 6.30pm and thought we'd try a bit of DIY.

A spot of DIY

We started with the oil in pipe and adaptor, using our new tap and die set we re-threaded our adaptor to once again find it did not fit. We then attempted to saw off the end of our oil pipe, this failed miserably and another part was ruined. Nevermind, let's try and get the actuator off the bracket, without a vice to hold the actuator we sawed through the actuator and ruined it and did not managed to separate it from the bracket. Another part ruined. Time to give up on the turbo and try and tap out the torsion bar from the back end, this resulted in breaking our new tap & die set (cheap Chinese steel) and snapping off a bolt in our torsion bar. All together a pretty crap end to the day. It was time for a beer & BBQ, when was that track day again?

It's a bonnet off job fitting a new turbo.


Day Two - Raising the suspension

There was not much more we could do on the turbo, so we thought it was best to make a start on the rear end and try and sort out the stupidly lowered suspension, we'd worked out that at some point in its life the car had been lowered by 95mm, this is quite a lot and can prevent you from being insured. In theory it can be quite a simple job, remove torsion bar end caps, slip out the torsion bar, rotate the splines as much as you require, put back in and the car is magically higher. However, this is The Baron and he is not simple.

As the car has a body kit, this meant we could not access the torsion bar, we either had to remove the body kit (very messy), drill holes in the body kit (still messy) or take off the whole rear back axle (messy and awkward). We opted for the third option as it should be easier doing the job off the car. To remove the back axle requires undoing the four main bolts which feed into under the rear seats, undoing the brake lines and hand brake cables and undoing the rear shocks. After two or three hours the axle was off, all that was left was to tap the torsion ends and wind out the torsion bars. This is where we hit our next obstacle, the car had no end caps, so many years of road crude had badly corroded our torsion ends, and on one end it looked like someone had actually welded the end together. Our torsion bar was pretty screwed up and no end of belting it with a hammer and tapping with our cheap Chinese steel tap & die set was going to fix it.

Picture of our knackered torsion bar, WD40 and hammering were not going to fix it :o(


So, we'd failed on fitting the turbo and the back end of the car was missing, the shops were shut and there was nothing left we could do, apart from cancel any plans we had of a track day. Our plan was to still use the day off we'd all booked and rather go on a track day we'd continue fixing up the car. We'd drive down to CGB Motorsport in Telford, buy a new rear axle, take our turbo and any other none fitting parts and try and find a match, drive back and fix it up.

It was a shame we'd not achieved what we'd set out to do but we always knew this would not be simple, it's a 22 year old temperamental car after all.

1 comment:

  1. Suddenly I'm very happy I'm not part of this nightmare! What you do have on your hands though is a car of many nations; a car to act as an international bridge, to support diversity and bring the garlic eaters together with the raw fish munchers.

    The Baron in Britain, a French brand with Japanese parts, inspirationally impregnated with a bit of China.

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