Steering Rack & Suspension Off

The worst summer in a 100 years or more should surely mean spending more time indoors - like in my garage or updating this blog, but that's not been the case.

As there had been a serious power leak thanks to a loose main hydraulic hose connector the drivers (RHD) side of the steering rack, wishbone and cross-member are caked in a thick layer of grime. It looked particularly sad so I decided to begin stripping off the whole shebang for a thorough clean with a view to replacing knackered parts with shiney new ones.

Disconnecting the hoses and draining the power steering fluid is straight forward.

For the most part removing the rack is easy but when it came to the tie-rod ends it was impossible to loosen them when the rack was on the car. With the rack removed I could get the leverage to remove these 26 year old bits.

Next it was time to clean the rack - I used some GUNK Green degreaser from Halfruads that did a great job. The aluminium and steel shaft cleaned up a treat - as you can see from the pics!

Once the steering rack was thoroughly dry I painted the centre steel section with some Hammerite Smooth Silver.

The steering rack doesn't seem to have any leaks - although there was some residual fluid in the one boot, after wiping that out I'm fairly confident that the rack doesn't need a rebuild at this stage.

The next step was to strip out the front suspension. I began by removing the brake calipers, then the hubs and discs... The 6mm allen head bolt in the locking clamp is a little difficult to remove - mine have slightly rounded so it's defintely time to replace those before they become a future problem.

Followed by the spindles - placing all the bolts and nuts into marked bags. The strut-splindle bolts were quite a challenge to remove - they'd obviously not been off or moved in a very long time. The breaker bar came in handy and in the end all were removed and bagged for cleaning later.

It's incredible just how heavy the spindle and brake disc are. The hub is aluminium and very light by comparison. It turns out one of the rear wheel bearings was in poor shape so it's a good thing I'm doing this all in one go.

With the strut hanging inside the arch it's simply a matter of four 13mm nuts in the engine bay to remove and the whole strut & spring is free.

Now to clean everything before replacing the worn out bits!

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