Over the past little while, I have been eager to get some work done on the little green car... so I brought the car out to be dad's place in the forest, and began wrenching on stuffs.
The rear end of the green car made some horrible noises when driving over bumps (particularly on the passenger side), felt very loose (some side-to-side play), and im pretty sure the struts were also worn out.
I set about to swap in the following items from Laggin Wagon Ver1:
-GD Rear Struts + Springs
-Rear control arms
and...
-Rear drums to Disc conversion... because why the hell not!!
Work began in this general area here:
Taking one last look at the shoddy rear drums of time long past
I figured this would be a 4 or 5 hour job, get it done in one, maybe two work nights....... yeah, no
First major obstacle cane when I realized my dad didn't have any metric brake line wrenches. None of the imperial ones he had would fit snuggly... which made me nervous because the brake hose fitting looks like it never came off in the whole life of the car.
So we improvised...
...and we proceeded to begin rounding off one of the brake line fittings.
(even after letting it soak in penetrating fluid for a few minutes)
So my dad asked 3 or 4 of his neighbors if they had a 10mm brake line wrench that we could borrow.
Eventually we were successful! We we took a stab at removing the brake hose on the other side of the car (after letting it soak in penetrating fluid for even longer)
...We proceeded to begin rounding off this fitting as well.
Pro tip: If you plan on removing brake hoses, don't fuss around with brake line wrenches, go straight for the vice grips.
Also, turns out my dad has a very small selection of metric-sized wrenched. We ended up using imperial-sized sockets that matched the 19mm and 17mm fasteners "good nuff"
(Man, I need to stop drawing cues from the old thread
)
Fast forward a few hours... we removed most of the rear of the car. I'm glad I decided to go ahead with this work
The outer control arm bushings are VERY worn.
Also, the struts were indeed very blown
I wanted to avoid drilling slots in the stop strut mounts on the car if i didnt have to, so I wanted to see if I can swap over the tophats from the old assembly and slide these right in.
I knew they were different, but I didnt know they were quite this different... the springs seem to be larger in diameter on the GF struts as well
Unfortunately, the GF tophats to not simply swap over to the GD springs like I hoped they would... I ended up putting the old GF springs and top hats into the GD strut assembly.
but after hours of faffing around, we eventually got to this point.
It's beginning to look like a car again! and a cool one at that