Hello,
I'm breaking out of my rebuild thread to ask for help - I'm fitting the front axle to my chassis and have now just about bolted the radius arms into the chassis and the axles, but in doing so, I've somehow managed to push the axle forward, out of line with the dampers:
Here's the problem;
1. The NS radius arm is bolts to the axle and chassis - all nuts loose. The holes in the bushes wouldn't line up on the OS, so I pulled it forward with a ratchet strap attached to the back of my van.
2. This worked fine...
3. ...and the front bolt went in no problems.
You can see in the last picture that the spring seats are angled too far forward for the springs to sit on properly, but it struck me that without the weight of the engine on top of it, the front suspension is over-extended, hence the forward canted angle.
4. So, I compressed the front suspension using ratchet straps...
5. ...and the result was the springs bedded down on the seats much better, as the rotation between the chassis and the axle is now reduced.
6. For comparison, here's the NS spring before I compressed it.
But, I still couldn't get the rearward NS bolt into the radius arm at the axle mount, although it's fairly close and probably just needs a bit more force applied to compress the suspension. The problem is what the last picture shows;
7. The damper is obviously not straight up and down relative to the chassis. The only way I can see that this has happened is because the radius arms are forcing the axle forward, but they're bolted in fore and aft as intended, so what the hell's going on? The only thing I've changed since I took this axle off the chassis is the springs, the dampers and the bushes. The radius arm bushes are all in place properly, so the problem's not there - has anybody else ever done this? Is this how it went?
Any help here would be very much appreciated - I tried kicking it again, but this
still didn't help
![Sad :(](http://www.slroc.co.uk/forum/Smileys/default/sad.gif)
Thanks
![Smiley :)](http://www.slroc.co.uk/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
4.