A shocking revelation

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Tom Wells
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A shocking revelation

Post by Tom Wells »

A few days ago I took the Cobra out for a spin, part of getting it checked out for the Reptile Roundup next week.

One of the things I noticed was a kind of clinking sound when I hit a bump. At first I thought maybe something had happened to the car when it was in the shop, but after sleeping on it, consulting with Ken and rattling the magic chicken bones, I decided the shocks had somehow got shorter (springs relaxing?) and let the inner fender panels hit the upper A-arms while going over bumps. Turned out to be a correct idea but not the way I thought.

My first try was to adjust the coilovers to raise the front of the car, plus grinding away a bit of the inner fender panel which seemed to work. Here are some pretty bad photographs of the upper A-rms. The panel near the pivot points is what they were kissing if the springs deflected enough:
PassAArmweb.jpg
PassAArmweb.jpg (289.15 KiB) Viewed 1735 times
DriverAArmweb.jpg
DriverAArmweb.jpg (176.15 KiB) Viewed 1735 times
After some more thought and voodoo I checked the rod-end type mountings of the shocks AKA spherical bearings. Sure enough, over time they had compressed:
Bushingsweb.jpg
Bushingsweb.jpg (208.04 KiB) Viewed 1735 times
So Summit Racing got an order for a new set of ends which are due to arrive tomorrow.

BTW the part number was correct on the Summit web site, but not on the Aldan web site! I got a thank-you from Aldan for pointing this out, but no freebies 8-|
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