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Suspension Rebuild - Rear Suspension
A full suspension rebuild was on the order of the day... That provided a lot of challenges to me and my hobbyist tools. There were some serious torques at some points that I didn't have proper tools to deal with. First I started taking a look at the rear shocks. I have a trail built Suzuki Samurai where I use nitrogen rear shocks for a Ford Ranger that are pretty long and most important, readily available off the shelf. So I took a shock out of the Patrol and one out of the Sammy to compare.
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First issue was quickly noticed. The Ranger shock, despite being good size, had a super small eyelet/bush compared to the Patrol one. That made it very clear that the Patrol suspension needed that amount of bushing to flex. Patrol front shocks were a no-go as well. The bolt-bolt design is not that common for the options of large shocks I have here. Most are eye-eye or at least eye-bolt design. So I gave up on that and ordered OEM style shocks (Kayaba) from a neighbor country.
As for the link bushes, I had already in mind to make them locally in poly, after seeing the vast amount of poly options and brands available in Australia. I understood that it was a common replacement or even maybe an upgrade. My plan then was to take out the rear panhard bar and one of the four rear links. The idea was to do it in two steps so not leave the axle free to move too much. I would then take those to the machine shop, have new bushes made for the panhard and for the four links (despite having just one at hand). Back home, I would reinstall those, remove the remaining three links and replace bushes. First issues were with my tools not being good quality enough for the panhard bolts.
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I didn't have the strength to turn it with a short socket handle, so I put some pipes to provide leverage. The socket handle poor material was the next weak link and bent. Those were not CrV tools.
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Found this contraption in my tool box, something I built some 20 years ago for a specific job and never used again, but the handle was not up to the task as well, LOL.
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A lot of cursing and bending handles back to position later, I was able to remove the parts as planned.
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Examining the rear link, a surprise... It had already been tweaked at some point in life! Some bastard had replaced one of the bushing eyelets for a new one with the same OD and smaller ID, to use some sort of commercial vehicle bushing.
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I even took the time to try to find out which car/truck that bushing was from, but no luck.
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I could no longer ask the machinist to turn 8 identical rear bushes all at once, oh boy. But poly bushes would be the way, nevertheless. For reference, this were all the bushes I planned to have made:
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Talking to the machinist, he showed me a red poly material that he uses to make 4x4 bushings day and night, and he also had some blue poly material that was a bit softer. So we decided to use the red one for panhard bars, to position the axles with less give for a more precise alignment/driving and to use the blue material for the other links to provide more flex capability (in comparison with the red material, not with the OEM rubber) and more ride comfort. The first batch came out sweet!
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A trick I learned from an Internet mate called TheCrazyLatvian: to jack the diff housing close to the pinion to facilitate the alignment of the bracket and bushing holes for the bolt to pass through easily.
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Second batch came quickly after:
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Another tip from TheCrazyLatvian: rear lower control arms are slightly tilted outwards. Knowing that before hand was great!
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These were all the bushes accomplished this far:
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Also, I have replaced my rusty/scrap pipes I have been using for leverage with a proper CrV breaker bar. Man, how nice is to work with the correct tools! I have bought an torque wrench as well (not in the picture).
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Suspension Rebuild - Front Suspension
With the rear suspension covered, and new shocks on their way, I started working on the front suspension. I have never liked bolt-bolt design shocks (or should I call them stud-stud design shocks?). The drama on the front suspension disassembly started with the shocks. Top bolt, impossible to grip them on that ridiculous 10mm (maybe less?) flatten part of the bolt to unscrew the mega-frozen nut. I ended up winding some tie-down straps several rounds around the shock upper part (dust cover) until it locked and I could then only focus on the nut. Bottom bolt had a better sized grip thing, maybe 15mm or 17mm, where the bolt is welded to the shock body, but then, it is like 1/3 of the width of a common open end wrench. No way to fit a regular wrench there to hold it. Since the shocks were destined to the recycle bin anyway, I used vice-grips to hold the shock body while I was working on the nut. One of them was so frozen, the stud broke.
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In one of the sides, I found this "rattlesnake" there. You can imagine how that added to the already super rattling panels noise I was experiencing when driving.
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This time I decided to take it all apart instead of the two step approach used on the rear suspension links. No dramas to remove the front radius arms other then loosing one of the cross-member bolts to allow for some room to wrench on the mushroom bushing nut.
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Radius arms bushes were cracked.
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I can't come up with a good reason for the Nissan engineers to suit the upper coil buckets with a cover plate... My buckets were so packed with dirt, that it was full to the top. Had to excavate that to be able to reach the upper suspension bump stop nut, and of-course it was pretty frozen. Used an wire-brush attachment to a cordless drill to clean the nut and the last bolt threads and then soak it in penetrating oil to be able to remove the bump stop. All that dust with all that oil, you can imagine the mess.
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The coil spacer/cushioning thing was completely disintegrating. I measured what seemed to be the original width at a non-compressed part of the rubber and it had 10mm. I decided to have a 30mm coil spacer made to replace the OEM rubber one, with 10mm to account for the disintegrated rubber and 20mm to account for an eventual sagging on the original coils after 20+ years and 280k km on the clock (with no way to figure out if that was true).
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Took the old rubber, front and rear coils to the machinist for him to turn me new front/rear coil spacers. For the rear ones, since there was no previous rubber spacer/cushioning, I had to provide him with some more measurements.
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Rear coil springs have the last loop flat, while the front coil springs don't, so he made me different front and rear spacers to suit. They turned out very cool in my opinion.
Rear spacers:
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Front spacers:
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Then these babies arrived!
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And not so long after, these ones arrived!
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Front radius arms, panhard bar and new shocks all went in in a single night after work, and then on the following night, replaced the rear shocks. Suspension is all buttoned up and the car drives like a train on tracks now!
Let me approach the subject of wheels and tires on another post, and then I show you how the car instance is now. It is looking amazing.
