Mike's GT40 gets redone

[BlackSnake]

Ain’t that the truth…and I figured while I have the car in the air with the front wheels off, I need to install some splash shields on the rear of the wheel wells to keep water and dirt from migrating toward the cabin…

[Tom Wells]

Mike at work sanding down the wheel posts:

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The sander comes from a company in Brooklyn NY called the Ellward Mfg Co founded in 1946, closed before 2003. The next picture is the motor information plate. No idea how old it is, but probably almost as old as Mike, at least!

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The sander worked fine and Mike's off to the next part of his GT40 punchlist.

[BlackSnake]

That belt sander is a beast Tom, it saved me hours of work grinding the lugs on my bench grinder, and a much better result!

[BlackSnake]

So, as this car and project has continuously demonstrated, the deeper I look the more I uncover. This time it involves the front suspension. Per the RCR online assembly manual, the LCA (lower control arm) heim joints are to be initially set with half of the threads exposed in order to help facilitate adequate negative camber (-1 to -2 degrees). This seems to have been an adequate setting on the drivers side, achieving -1.5 camber within all assembly manual guidelines. Not so for the passenger side, which apparently required additional lengthening of the rod ends to achieve favorable camber settings. The rod ends were lengthened to an unacceptable length causing thread engagement into the LCA to be dangerously short, only .425” by my calculations.

The bolts that attach the LCA rod ends to the chassis pocs are located inside the footwells and are darn near inaccessible at this point. The passenger footwell being somewhat more accessible than the drivers side for obvious reasons, was a bit of a relief. Youth and agility is required for this task, so William came over to help as this is truly a two person job. A good bit of contortion, power tools and breaker bars came into play, but we were successful in removing the bolts, threading in the rod ends to half thread engagement, and reinstalling the hardware.

At this point, I jacked the suspension to approximate ride height and checked camber with Tom’s Longacre bubble gauge and noted camber to be approximately +2 degrees…not good. The only way to achieve negative camber from here is to shorten the UCA adjustments, but the UCA rod ends are threaded all the way in and the upper ball joint, which is actually a tie rod end from a sixties vintage Chevy PU truck, is also threaded nearly all the way in.

Hmm, okay, so the upper ball joint/tie rod has a very thick (.42”) jam nut on both the inside and outside of the UCA. I considered thinning down the outboard jam nut, similar to what I had to do on the rear suspension years ago, but I figured I should first see if I could achieve acceptable camber with the nut removed. I should also mention that at this point it’s become glaringly obvious that the upper joint has no grease boot installed, and a quick check of the other side is the same…

[Tom Wells]

Wow, Mike! I wonder if any of that thing was correctly assembled? Yikes!

[BlackSnake]

In the “nothing’s ever easy” category, separating the upper joint from the upright was a pain. Tried the pickle fork with no joy, but didn’t give it much of a whack not wanting to damage the joint or the aluminum upright, so next I reached for the ball joint separator. It wouldn’t fit of course, so it had to be modified on the grinder.

It was nerve racking tightening the bolt a little at a time and tapping with a hammer on each turn, again, not wanting to damage a valuable billet aluminum part, but it eventually let go with a loud pop…

So I removed the jam nut and screwed the joint all the way back into the UCA. Loosely reassembled it and rechecked camber at 0…

I will have to forgo the outboard jam nut, but one (inboard) should suffice, and others on the gt40s.com site have done likewise on their cars with no reported issues.

Another thing I considered was thinning the UCA rod end jam nuts, but they’re smaller than the ball joint and LCA jam nuts, and probably wouldn’t yield enough adjustment, so now I had to consider re-lengthening the LCA rod ends, but how much?

I broke out a set of feeler gauges and started to shim between the wheel hub and the bubble gauge at 6 o’clock position until it showed -1.5 camber with .055 shim. Time to do a bit of math. LCA rod ends are 5/8-18, so 1” divided by 18 TPI equals .055”…

Hopefully my math will prove correct and one full turn out on each lower rod end will actually yield -1.5 camber, which will nicely match the driver’s side.

On another note, during disassembly of the coil over shock, I discovered the lower perch is missing the swivel misalignment safety washers, or any washers at all, so nothing to keep the lower end of the shock centered on the fulcrum pin as it sits in the LCA perch. Oh, same thing on the drivers side…unreal. So I ordered four new safety washers from McMaster-Carr ($9 each), should get them early next week.

Also noticed the front sway bar down links have no jam nuts installed on either side, so I disassembled them and installed jam nuts.

Last item to correct is to replace the straight Zerk fittings on the upper ball joints with 45 or 90 degree fittings so I can actually grease them when assembled and whenever necessary.

[BlackSnake]

Oh, I nearly forgot, the lower ball joint boots are pretty well shredded, so I’ll need to replace them as well…I think that’s everything…

[BlackSnake]

Wow, Mike! I wonder if any of that thing was correctly assembled? Yikes!

So true Tom, but I think I’ve captured the worst of the screwups at this point…he says with fingers tightly crossed…

[1rad65futura]

It’s in the details for sure! What a workout those LCA bolts were it’s unfortunate that those rubber boots didn’t hold up in the home stretch!

[BlackSnake]

Yep, a workout for sure, especially for you. Good thing you’re young and flexible with a long reach…

Those boots must have just aged out, no other reason for them to crumble on a car with fewer than 100 driven miles…