Work Begins

After several years I finally got around to starting some work on the car by painting the front suspension.  I know, it’s not very ambitious, but years of neglect had left the A-arms and all looking pretty shabby.  Plus I needed to replace the missing “shock strut” so that I could level the car and raise the ride height.  When I bought the car it was missing the coil-over shocks and had only three fixed rods in their place so the left front corner was sagging.  The other issue that has given me problems is that the ride height was set at less than half an inch so the car dragged on anything.

A quick order for a couple of new swedged steel tubes allowed me to level and raise the front suspension.  I then raised the rear by the same amount and now I have over two inches of ground clearance.  It looks fine, not too high off of the ground and I’d like to have it even higher, but I’m getting close to the maximum droop of the suspension to where things are close to start binding up.  It’s fine for now and if I decide I need more ground clearance then I can do something relatively easy like getting taller tires or something more radical like getting different uprights that place the spindle lower relative to the rest of the suspension.  A new upright would be a fair amount of work in the beginning, but it would solve the ride height problem and allow me options when it comes to a braking system.  Did I mention that the car didn’t come with brakes?

Front suspension components being painted and hanging from my improvised paint rack.

All painted and put back together.