I FINALLY got my club sport back on the road.
It has been in my garage for 3 weeks.
I had been collecting parts to make the rear toe and camber adjustable IE style, when my rear wheel bearings started getting load. Then my car started consuming coolant, so I decided it was time. I'll get into what happened on the coolant loss issue in another thread.
So this is what I did. I fabricated 8 brackets for the rear subframe and had them welded in. Then I used 5 series eccentric bolts, washers and nuts.
The arrangement looks like this:
I knew I needed to have a way to get the old subframe bushings out, so I made a puller which looks like this:
It worked well. There is a nice thrust bearing which takes the load. It too so much force to pull one of the bushings out that I bent one of the blocks at the top. Remember, I was going to do some welding on the subframe so I took the whole thing out and removed the bushings in my basement.
Now I am not anti Ireland, but I don't like Urethane bushings, so I replaced the subframe bushings and rear trailing arm bushings with stock parts. There is something I did not like about the stock subframe bushings however. There are air gaps built into the bushing at the top and bottom and relieved areas in the middle. I ran into a thread by Randy Forbes and he described making stuffers to fit in the bushings. So I followed his lead and made a set of my own. The parts look like this:
My first attempt failed as I made the mold from a used beer case. Next I made an aluminum mold and filled it with liquid urethane from McMaster Carr. Now I know I already said that I don't like Urethane, but in this case the rubber is what is doing the work, the urethane is filling in the air gaps only.
This is what mine look like installed:
Next I had to replace the growling rear bearings. They were bad for sure. And if I didn't use an 8 ton press, they would not have come out. I had originally designed the subframe removal tool in a way that it could be used to do the bearings too (with some other tubes and plates), but there was no way. I could use the tool to re-install the bearings, and to pull the hubs in, though.
While I had the subframe out I painted it and cleaned up the diff cover, and replaced the diff fluid with Royal Purple and a LSD additive.
Overall the job was a pain in the a$$ but the results are amazing. The rear feels so planted now, and the bearings are silent.