1973 MGB GT- A little rust 30/08

Cheers I've double checked my haynes diagram and there doesn't seem to be any cotter pin, there is a grub screw but I'm not sure if thats for the bolt or not, I'll have a look under the layers of crud tomorrow. Although if I'm just removing the bolt it may not be an issue? I've got a new bolt to go in so I'll check if its got a groove

Excellent progress mate.
It's been a while since I've done mine, but I don't remember any Grub screws.
Looking on the MGOC Spares it does not show any, that being said I remember a small cut-out in the bolt.

Day 3 of the front suspension work began with me worrying that I wouldn't be able to get the bottom kingpin bolts out so I'd have to drive back to Coventry on the old wishbones and bushes.

To tackle this issue I decided to skirt round it by having a go at the passenger side instead to see if I had any more luck there. Well I tried spinning the bolt with the ratchet and it actually moved a bit which I took as a good sign, so armed with lots of penetrant spray, a bigger hammer and some brute force I was able to do this



SUCCESS!! got the curse word out, a quick look at the lower arms showed that there was a bit of tension in the system which may not have been helping things, so the use of a trolley jack was later employed



You may also notice that I've put the spring pan back in, I did this temporarily to brace up the lower wishbone arms as I was concerned that they were just absorbing my hammer hits by flexing rather than the bolt moving, so replace the spring pan on the drivers side and liberally apply penetrant (I had run out of shock and unlock by this point so I was using some 3 in 1 pentrant spray which I don't really rate) and I managed to get the bolt to move a bit



Kept hammering at it (the neighbours must it when I'm around..) and using the bolt from the other side as a drift, it eventually came out



So now I could think about the actual wishbone arms themselves, regular readers (lol) will recognise these from some time ago but to recap. We've got negative camber wishbone arms, new drop links, new lower kingpin bolts along with dust seals and thrust washers (don't have time to fit the supplied metal bush) and a pair of proper bolts for the anti roll bar to drop link



Heres a quick comparison of old to new, the new wishbones are a little longer to give some negative camber to improve turn in and front grip



You can roughly see the length difference



So then I got on with removing the old wishbones, one miraculously slid right off , another came off with a bit of hacksawing at the bush and the last two came off but left the bush on the pivot



You can see the remains of two of the bushes in the pile there haha

Taking the wishbones off also showed the condition of the lower kingpin bolt assemblies, this shows the typical condition of the dust seals..



And thats where the progress ends for today, been attacking the stuck bush crush tubes but they don't want to budge, will get some shock and unlock tomorrow to try to freeze the pivot a bit smaller to help the tubes come off or I'll have to use some heat to expand the tubes.

Heres how the passenger side is looking



Nicely stuck on there



And the drivers side



same story



Needless to say, copper grease will be used on rebuilding to avoid things getting stuck in the future

Another thing I've been doing is manually wire brushing and painting the spring pans to get a little bit more life out of them, they'll likely get replaced in the not too distant future as they're fairly cheap, unfortunately the only paint lying about was some green hammerite



An interesting look haha

More to follow tomorrow, I'm sure this is the most frequent updating I've ever done

Looking good, that's going to handle differently now with the new bushes and ARB up front

The above are all good suggestions on removing the crush tube, the only other one I can add is heating it up well with a blow torch and then chucking some water over it.

Best of luck

You best hurry up if you want to start work on Monday

Sweeeet! Yeah, get the alignment done ASAP. I imagine working down there and changing so many things will have put it out slightly anyway, and you'd be surprised how much difference even slight adjustments make. Good work though, you don't seem to have got too stressed with it at all, which is something I always struggle with when tackling such things. Those crush tubes would have ruined my mood for a week!

Btw, what springs did you go for?

Thought I'd grab some better pictures of the new 'lows'















Looks decent parked up but still need to get that geometry sorted though

That looks really good

The shorter bumpstops are available quite cheaply. I had a set fitted to my 'B:




The existing ones are not too hard to remove if you know how . Due to the spacer blocks being alloy and the nuts being made of steel electrolytic corrosion occurs. Knowing what I know now I would just take an angle grinder to the spacer blocks and the bolt heads with a good cutting disc (I ended up doing this to both of my old bump stops). IIRC I ordered my shortened ones from David Manners (so Moss will also sell them, but possibly for a little more). Like Seth I would run with a set of correct bumpstops in place .

www.moss-europe.co.uk/Shop/ViewProducts.aspx?PlateIndexID=13364