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HybridZ

Booya, grandma.. booya. Front struts done!


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About time.. I took my front struts to Eric at Dave Turner Motorsports and he gave me a three-and-a-half-finger discount. He's done many many pairs of Z and 510 struts so he knows what he's doing. It took him a week to get all the work done because he had two other pairs to section besides mine, and a Jetta to install all kinds of suspension stuff on. But that's okay, I've had plenty to do myself. My front suspension is a mess, totally caked with oily grease and dirt. I scraped chunks that were literally an inch thick off the front crossmember - there was apparently a leak on the motor that got fixed, and nobody bothered to clean it up, because the bottom half of the motor and the suspension was just coated with dirty grease. There's nothing new that I can see at the moment, so I don't think I'm still leaking oil. The level hasn't gone down. So anyway, I'm going to take all my suspension parts in to my autoshop class and steam-clean them to get rid of the rest of the dirt, then scrub thoroughly with Simple Green, then repaint black. The ball joints are giving me trouble. Pardon my forgetfulness, but what's the name of the suspension piece right beneath the strut? It connects with a ball stud to a little arm that connects with a ball stud to the steering linkage. Anyway, I'm not sure if there's supposed to be a rubber boot there. There were rubber boots intact on the steering linkage studs. I'm afraid to clean all that stuff up, squirt new grease into the nipples, and have it instantly be exposed to the air and pick up tons more dirt. Energy suspension sent me a pair, but only one pair, of boots to replace the rubber boots on the other ball studs.

 

What do you suggest I do with my brakes? I'm going to be upgrading sometime in the future, but for now I'd like to at least get the calipers looking nice. You can see one in the first pic. Rusty color, slightly discolored because of repeated squirts with Liquid Wrench while in the process of disassembly. I really don't feel like rebuilding the calipers, which I guess I need to do if I want to paint them, huh? :P

 

Anyway, here they are. Tokico Illumina 5-way adjustable shocks (MR2, thanks a lot for the nice discussion of MR2 vs. Rabbit struts that helped me pick them out!), Ground Control coilovers (150# front, Eric said they'd be great for my application), and you can see the polyurethane Energy Suspension bumpstops. They were sectioned two inches, no spacer installed beneath the MR2 strut. I'm stoked.

 

struts.jpg

 

struts2.jpg

 

Now, once I get the front suspension rebuilt, I get to move on to the rear.. fun.. can't wait to smack out the dreaded pins. Can't wait to get the diff on the ground so I can discover just how many things are wrong with it.. probably end up upgrading to an R200.. which means I'll probably end up upgrading to a 5spd tranny.. which means.. etc.. etc.. it never ends smile.gif

 

[This message has been edited by Nion (edited March 08, 2001).]

 

[This message has been edited by Nion (edited March 08, 2001).]

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God damn it.. can anyone point me to a REAL webspace that will let me link to their damn images? Geocities, yahoo pictures, photopoint, 100megsfree, tripod, angelfire, postmypic.com... NONE OF THEM will let me post a pic on another site. Well, maybe one or two will, but they don't have FTP capability and their uploaders SUCK! I'm about to cry in frustration :P postmypic.com is the most promising, but for some damn reason it won't let me upload from my Mac!

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