[Marv]

Right, so the front suspension of my car is back together! I ended up stripping out the top control arms, spindles and steering arms, cleaning them up and getting them powder coated along with the brackets Master Power Brakes supplied with their disc conversion kit.



I blew the old control arms apart and threw out the ball-joints when I saw how old and flogged out it all was. The car drove pretty well but if I have it apart now i may as well tighten all this gear up now, right? Plus, it's easy stuff to do!



While I've had some issues with other parts of the kit, mostly from incorrect parts being initially supplied, bolting up the actual discs and calipers was easy as pie and I found them very good quality.

Having all new steering and ball joints made the job much cleaner and nicer to do! I did have to clean up the wheel bearing adapter (hammered onto spindle using a piece of pipe) with some Scotchbrite as there was some surface rust on it but that wasn't hard and it was a nice piece.


I will see how long these cheap wheel bearings last but it won't be hard to change them out if they do fail and I won't be doing huge miles in this car every day of the week.


All done in around an hour, including torquing-up the steering arms and installing split-pins.


In the aim of making the car drive straight and true at 80mph I've now fitted:
- Upper & lower ball-joints
- Drag-link
- Idler arm
- Tie-rod adjusters
- Tie rods
- Steering box (short ratio)
- Upper control arm bushes & shafts
- Wheel bearings
- Disc brakes

I'll have to take my grease gun up to Ryan's to finish it off, and also bleed the power steering with fresh fluid in the new steering box.

I probably should have powder coated the top control arms but I would have needed to get them media blasted first.... and then I'd have wanted to pull the bottom arms out... and then I'd have been tempted to pull the whole chassis (I have plans to do that later on, including converting to a more modern steering rack/tube arm front-end and IRS down the back - but that'll happen several years from now!)