Rear Suspension and Brake Pipes

Saturday - This weekend I thought I would get on with the rear of the car.  The first thing to do was to clean out all the holes where the bolts would go.  When I bought the car, I chose to have the chassis powder coated and this adds a layer of protection but in so doing, reduces the size of any holes buy a small margin.  These need either filing with a hand file or with a drill and sanding bit.  Once this was done I fitted the off side shock absorber.  These are gas shocks and are very adjustable and will help later on to set the car up well.  The upper wishbone is then fitted.  I had to cut down one of the fixing bolts as it would have hit the chassis and not tightened up properly.  The bottom of the shock absorber fits to the upper wishbone.

Next was the lower wishbone and hub carrier.  This took a bit of persuasion to fit but finally went in.  Once it was all in place, I tightened it all up.

I then repeated the process for the nearside.  I still have to fit the drive shafts and brakes etc, but that will be for another day.

Sunday - I didn't have a lot of time today due to other commitments but I still wanted to do something.  A fairly simple job was to fit the hand brake and the hand brake cable.  The hand brake was a simple job of 2 nuts and bolts.  The cable was also simple to run and put in place.  I then moved on to the brake pipes.  A single pipe runs from the front of the car to a splitter valve.  From the splitter is some copper pipe and then flexible brake hoses which run to the calipers (once fitted).  This was a simple process of gently bending the pipes into shape and tightening the appropriate nuts.  I kept going back and forth from the garage to the study to check the build images I have from the factory and other builds.  They are worth their weight in gold as a good point of reference.  This is what the back end is looking like now.

I started to look at the brake pipe run from the rear to the front of the car.  I laid the pipe out as it should be and then went to tackle adding some P Clips.  I tried one with a 3.2mm rivet only to find it wasn't really big enough and the P clip didn't hold together.  I think it will need some 4mm rivets which I have left over form when I part build a Westfield some 15 years ago.  This was a sign to me that I was rushing things and I decided that was a good point to stop for the day, before I did any damage that was not recoverable.