...

 

Congratulations on five years sober!

 

A while ago, I planted the front right wheel into a pothole which stopped the car dead in its tracks, broke the wheel, and bent everything in that corner.

Replacing the wheel and tire was easy. Got the car back on the road a few days later.

I finally decided to address the rest of the fucked-uppedness.



The front right upper A-arm is so tweaked that I was finding it impossible to slide the long bolt which holds it in place out.




It is now out.






EDIT: It's been a long time since this ole' rust bucket has had any new parts bolted onto it.






I'm reminded of a moment in Star Wars, in which Han Solo reassures everyone that the Falcon will hold together, immediately after which he turns, puts his hand on a bulkhead, and says "C'mon, baby, hold together."

That's actually become something of a mantra for us at work. WGN is a majestic old station, but it is an OLD station. We have been in this building since 1961, and I am still using some (just a tiny bit) of that original infrastructure in our broadcast plant today. Say what you will about SDI and ATSC being curmudgeonly by modern standards, the designers made those technologies backwards-compatible with *everything.*





All new parts on the right front...







Booped the snoot:









Obviously, I'm now dealing with the fact that I need to replace Left S̶h̶a̶r̶k Shock as well, and of course after seven salty winters, those threads are bonded together more strongly than true love...

 

 

 

I did my brakes this weekend, and somehow didn't break anything.




But i will say, it's annoying to have calipers where the pad can slide in/out, but the pads are adhered to shims that fit into the pistons so removal without removing the rotor is impossible anyway...

 

It's that vaunted "German engineering".

 

It just wouldn't be The Porsche Experience if some part of it were not engineered with malice aforethought.

(Also, I LOL at learning that 911s have drum brakes. Yes, I know it's disc-over-drum. Doesn't change the fact that drums are present, just like they were on my 1982 Tomos; communist eastern Europe's third most popular motorcycle under 50cc.)


I'm really starting to recognize the value of the system which enables the fast and efficient connection of buyers and sellers of used auto parts.

On Sunday, I broke the shaft of the left outer tie rod end on my NB. It snapped at the part where the cotter pin goes, and then I broke my ball-joint-press trying to get it out of the steering knuckle. Road salt is a bitch.

Which means that I'm gonna replace the knuckle. Might as well do a new hub while I'm in there. And also the upper and lower control arms. This car is gonna have 100% new suspension by the time I finally get it back on the road.



Now, the hub and the control arms, those are parts-store parts. RockAuto, in this case.

But steering knuckles, those are a little harder to come by.

It is within our lifetimes, you and I, that we'd have been working the phones, calling up junkyards in order of distance from our present location, looking for someone who has an NB with an intact left-front corner. And, given the fact that road salt is a major contributing factor to my being in this situation, we'd be specifying one with zero body rust.

But today? Nah. Five minutes on the web on Sunday evening and I had one on order from a junkyard in Missouri. And it was sitting on my front porch when I got home today.


Efficiency, man. Internet Culture has a lot of downsides, granted. But I'm old enough to remember working in a pre-web world. And I gotta tell you, I do dig the way things work today.


Image unrelated, this is a character I've been doodling with as part of an ad for a fictitious radio station. 97.5 FM: The Quail. Manitoba's Folk Authority!




I'd like to think that it's obvious how my inspiration here is the canary, which represents the famous transvestite musician Walter / Wendy Carlos, as it appeared on the cover of Weird Al Yankovic's 1988 re-imagining of Sergei Prokofiev's magnum opus Peter and the Wolf.

 

yeah but now i don't have to worry about my street compound ceramic pads sticking to hot rotors when i get off the highway and pull the hand brake after running errands.

 

it really is today.

 

 

 

 

Me: "This ball joint needs to come out."

The ball joint: "I cannot in good conscience comply with your request."

Me: "It wasn't a request."




Road salt is hard on more than just sheet metal.

By the time this is all complete the front suspension of this car is going to be nearly 100% new parts. The steering knuckles I've purchased clean used from non-salty markets. And I'm not planning to replace the calipers or the inner tie rods.




EDIT: I recognize that it may not have been obvious from the photo. Both the upper and lower ball joints, the outer tie rod end, and the wheel hub and bearings, are all still attached to that knuckle. I just unscrewed the tie rod and then pulled the three big bolts, and dropped the whole rusted-together assembly as a unit.





I was planning to replace much of it anyway, so the collateral loss of the upper and lower A-arms, the knuckle, and the rotor are far less impactful than the psychological benefit of just not having to deal with that **** anymore.

 

 

Never mention German engineering to me. I had to work on a Golf-based Cabrio. Not one of my wife's better ideas to buy that.

 

This is a Delphi brand NB front left lower control arm, sold by Rock Auto. Part # TC6706




It seems to be well-made, in terms of the visible welds and the forming of the metal, however it turns out not to fit. The distance between the two cylindrical bits, which house the rubber bushings where it mounts to the subframe via the camber-adjusting bolts, is wrong. A lot wrong, in fact. Like 4 mm off as compared to the original part.

So, that's a bummer.





But even though the lower ball joint of the old arm was seized into the old knuckle, I was able to un-bolt the old BJ from the old arm itself, and transfer this new BJ over to the old arm, so that it could then attach to the new (used) knuckle. I didn't bother trying to transfer the bushings, as my vise is not large enough, but at least my car is finally back on its own four wheels again.



Been a while since I've done a tape-measure alignment.







Finally:




The second week of June is not a great accomplishment in terms of getting what has become a summer-only car back on the road. Those six winters during which I drove it through snow and road salt really took their toll.

 

Goddamn, it feels good to drive a Miata with non-fucked-up suspension again.

I did only the rear shocks at first, since the back end was apart anyway to replace a wheel bearing, and I knew they were super-blown to begin with.

After that, the car become virtually uncontrollable.

Turns out that one of the front sway bar links had disintegrated, so I effectively had no front sway bar at all. That, and the virtually nonexistent rear shocks, were cancelling each other out.


Anyway, over in the politics thread, a lot of wind has been blown about how the mRNA-based Covid vaccinations were deliberately engineered to cause blood clots, although no one ever presented a plausible explanation as to why this might have been done.

Well, consider this:





That's right. It was all a big coverup to disguise Canada's new superweapon.