Quote:
Originally Posted by AP3X_FTW
This is by far the most time consuming part of the install. Unfortunately I have not found a trick to this process. One side went in fairly quickly (luck), and the other side took me about an hour on the one bolt. Using a floor jack certainly helps if you are doing this alone, but you will need to adjust things left to right, up and down. This makes things incredibly difficult.
|
It would be embarrassing for me to say exactly how many hours I spent on aligning the lower control arm and spindle. Suffice it to say that I spent several hours a day over several days ...
Even though both sides were both ultimately successful because of luck, the first side responded better to the punch technique suggested by Harold at HPA. Get the control arm and spindle bearing at the same level by supporting the control arm with a jack, and then use a punch (I used the shaft of a burly screwdriver) to further align and fine tune the spindle holes. I used a portable vehicle jack to support the spindle assembly separately in that case. To my great surprise it finally worked.
On the other side, I ended up being able to manhandle the alignment of the holes enough to slide a 3/8" extension through to the other side. There was still enough misalignment to prevent passing the actual bolt, so I'd pull on the extension in a way that seemed to maximize alignment, and watched the spindle move a certain direction, which in this case was a bit diagonal (upwards and towards the rear of the car.) I used the temporary jack at an angle to mimic this movement and was able to align it enough to remove the extension and get the bolt in. Without the jack, no amount of leveraging the punch would work ... the spindle would just bounce back to its previous position.
Nothing more frustrating than being 1.5 mm off in alignment and not being able to budge it any further. It will be cold, cold day in hell before I monkey around with this again!