Totally bushed.

During the work on the chassis, in parallel there was work going on on the wishbones. The rears that I showed before turned out great:



I was using POR15 paint with POR chassis black on top. Very pleased with this. Other one:



It's dried very hard indeed.

The others were coming on too:



These are the top fronts.

You may notice that all the bushes are now out. I took the wishbones along to a local garage who got them out (eventually). I thought that they'd just be able to press them out, but they're an awkward shape, so some of them needed some different techniques. Unfortunately these techniques took about 13 hours all in all, which at their hourly rate (which is not unreasonable) added up to about the cost of a completely new set of wishbones! If I'd known this before I embarked on this project (which was supposed to be cheap - my labour, a bit of labour from the garage's use of the press and some rust protective paint), I'd have just bought a new set of wishbones. Now that would be frustrating enough (but I could live with it - it's learning, and restoring these parts has been educational and fun at times), but the wishbone bushes were in and stuck fast, and some of the techniques used to get them out must have been fairly brutal. When I was painting the front lower wishbones tonight, I noticed that the there's been a pretty serious deformation. Here's how one side is (and how it should look):



and here's the other one from the other side of the car:



I know that this is hard to see in these photos (it's pretty obvious in the flesh), but you should be able to see that in the first of these two photos the tube that holds the bush is parallel with the square bracing steel to the lower left of it in the picture. In the lower picture (which is a closer view), it clearly isn't. You can see how the diagonal has been deformed, dragging the bush holding tube toward the brace. Even if it went back on the car (which I don't think it would), this would have a pretty drastic effect on the suspension geometry. This wishbone is now an ex-wishbone. I've ordered a new set of tubular lowers.

So this post is again a downer, and this time more than just my morale - it's hit me in the wallet! Ugh.