A LASER-EQUIPPED BUSINESS COUPE

 Greetings!

Much is said about the misguided political policies of the Left in America, and of the evil intentions of president Obama to re-distribute the wealth. But, very little is said about the devastation caused by the 15 month old grandson who now walks, handles everything within reach, and redistributes things far from where they belong. There ought to be a button that parents and grandparents can push at the end of the day, when the toddler is sleeping, that will automatically reset the living area - much like the Restore feature on my computer's Windows operating system.

Since the arrival of several boxes of merchandise from Speedway Motors, I've been able to proceed with the assembly of the new front suspension on Gary's '51 Chevy business coupe. The first task was to weld in the new crossmember as I covered in the last post.

I couldn't help but notice the mounting tab located on the lower control arm. Although it wasn't mentioned in the 2-page instructions, I could think of no other purpose than that of a sway bar mount. I re-attached the stock sway bar and saw that it came no where near the mount and was too narrow, even if I was to re-locate it closer to the control arm. I'll store this sway bar in the West Wing Repository for a future project.

I decided to complete the welding, so I attached the upper spring caps to the top of the frame rail. They needed to be centered over the axle centerline. I laid a long iron guide from one cap to the other to make sure that they were aligned to each other then welded everything up.

I found a much thicker sway bar in my West Wing Repository and measured it for length and found it to be 5/8" too wide for the brackets on the lower control arm. OR, maybe the brackets on the control arm were too narrow.

It's impossible to cut & weld the sway bar so I considered my options for altering the mounts. Since it was 5/8" too narrow, i thought that if I cut the brackets off and re-attached them each 5/16" further away, it would solve the problem. Then, I ran into the next problem: the mounts were too shallow for the urethane bushings and hardware to fit under the bracket without hitting the control arm tubing. The old, dried out, crusty, decrepit, compressed bushing and nut kind of fit under the bracket, just barely, but the new, vibrant, red urethane bushings were too large to fit.

I thought this was odd. You see, when I chose sway bar hardware for Gary's car I didn't search out the fattest, plump & juicy, oversize bushings to install with the sway bar, I chose popular, high quality units from Energy Suspension - one of the top names in the market. They were hanging in plain sight in my local Auto Zone store. Why wouldn't the engineers who produced the sway bar bracket for the Speedway kit allow enough room for these high quality components to fit? 

Maybe it wasn't really a sway bar mount. I don't know everything. My friend Tim does. So, maybe it was a mount for a laser that would vaporize cats that darted in front of Gary's car? Maybe it was a mount for a chain and anchor that the driver could deploy if the brakes fail. Maybe it was for a device (still in the experimental stage in the Tea Party Labs) that would correct the problem of toddlers. & presidents bent on redistribution. Maybe I should ask Tim.

In the meantime, I made the decision to leave the bracket in place and merely modify it to become functional. I made a cut around the large mounting hole for the bushing. I cut it purposely offset to allow me to flip it over, giving me the 5/16" I needed to be the proper length for my donor sway bar. Maybe that's the problem: the sway bar isn't from a Chevrolet like everything else in my West Wing Repository (except for the Ford 9" rear axle housings). Instead, maybe it was a sway bar from something really obscure like a Dodge or a Hupmobile or a riding lawn mower? 

It was clear that this modification would solve the width problem but I still had to deal with the clearance problem - the mounting nut still wouldn't fit. The answer was to further offset the bracket away from the control arm tubing.

I'll have to gusset the piece to make it strong enough to allow Gary to careen around Yakima valley intersections, dodging the many, many Honda-driving international visitors we enjoy. 

I'm thinking of contacting the engineering department at Speedway Motors about the fitment of the suspension components and the inaccuracy of their written instructions, but then maybe it's just me and my oddball mystery car parts in the Repository. I once heard Tim (from Tim's Repair 509 839-5139) complain to me that he never buys parts from *that company that will not be named* because he had to struggle to make things fit and work properly. I happen to really like Speedway Motors and the people I speak with there, like Dave Hanson who helped me get my account set up. I think they should know. I'll make the call and report back in a subsequent post here on Doug's Drugs. 

Doug