More or less ready for SVA

Last post I was talking about lockstops. The front tyres are 245/40/18's and as such they foul the inner wings on full lock. The problem is made worse by having to raise the car to get the front indicators up to the required height. This means that the suspension is in droop relative to the chassis (by winding up the bottom spring pans), with the movement of the wishbones these moves the wheels even closer to the inner wings!!

So I need to fit lockstops to the steering rack. First job was to unto the ties and pull the boots back:

Here you can see the rack shaft and the stock nylon lock stop. Any additional stops need to be fitted on the outside of the nylon stop so that they don't get ingested into the rack internals.

Here we see plan A on the left and plan B on the right:

Plan A was a split 2mm thick aluminium washer. The idea being to bend it open, fit on the rack and bend it back. however...... I have very little room to get my arms in due to the Accusump being in the way. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't bend them closed again!

So plan B was to use some 1.6mm thick polycarbonate. The beauty of this plan is that they simply be "snapped" onto the rack due to thier felxibility:

So process was them simple - insert a polycarbonate spacer - check for wheel rub - if so add another. Easy and only took a few minutes, once the spacers had been made (I even made some spares for the SVA just in case!). You can see the spacers here on the outside of the white nylon spacer:

The boots were pulled back over and new ties added to fix them.

This of course necessitated driving around outside the house to thoroughly test the performance of full lock - importantly the steering was making an effort to self centre at relatively slow speeds.

And that was that really...... time for some more photo's:

Put a couple of clips on the throttle cable to tidy it up, calibrated the speedo, polished a few things, sat and stared at various things for a while, and in no time at all it was dusk so I set out some markings on my garage door and set the headlamp aim up as per the Wipac instructions.

This only left two jobs on the to do list, bedding in the brakes and setting the emissions..... I will attempt the first on the way to SVA and the second at the SVA test - should only require a twiddle of the idle jets on the carb.

I assume over the next few days I might find the odd tweak or two to keep me busy...........