Front end with Protech shocks, Escort quick rack and steering column extension in position:
Nearside front
Side view of upright. Decided to use washers (to protect the powder coat) and temporarily plain nuts (to preserve the nyloc nuts) until the she's got wheels and is on the ground.
Not yet sure how I'll torque up the top ball joint (or even what the torque should be). The rocker arm is shown set as far back as possible to improve self centring of the steering (shock also needed setting back to match):
Viewed from the front:
Offside front
Similar story although top rocker washers need adjusting since they're not yet the correct combination of sizes to take up the fore/aft play:
Viewed from the front:
Offside rear
Once the handing of the rear uprights and top wishbones were figured out it was pretty straight forward to assemble the rear set up. In this case it's a drum brake set up which means the uprights are fitted with the flat face pointing to the rear. With the lower mounting for the uprights it took a couple of tries to get right the number and position for the washers so that the upright is held solidly when the long lower bolt is tightened:
It's going to be a pain to set up the camber and toe in. For the latter the upright needs to be moved clear enough to allow the front rose joint to be screwed in or out (see bottom left in the following picture). This means removing virtually completely the lower bolt, and therefore the spacing washers etc.:
In the above picture you can see how the front bolts on the top and bottom wishbones need to be oriented so that once the rear panel is fitted the bolts can still be removed (nuts to the front - so to speak). Get this wrong and removing the wishbones would be a nightmare.
Nearside rear
The only difficulty on the nearside was that the lower mounting holes on the upright needed filing out a little since one metal tube hadn't been welded on quite square and therefore wasn't aligned for the bolt to go through easily.
The rear end then looked like this:
Drive shafts
With the drum brakes Sierra Tripod drive shafts are used. These are modified (shortened) and rebuilt by FSC. The following picture shows what the rear end looks with the drive shafts fitted:
However it quickly became clear that there was a problem with the length of the offside drive shaft since it didn't protrude through the upright enough to be compressed as the bearing carrier is bolted on:
Looks like it's back to FSC for the O/S drive shaft.
On the offside a quick experimental assembly of the upright spacer, brake back plate, bearing carrier, hub and drum to prove it all fits together - this showed up that the four bolts through the upright were too short by about 10mm so will need to sort these as well - looks nice though:
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