Suspension, Diff & Drive Shafts
 

The front suspension was a bit of false start. We had purchased some Cortina uprights, complete with discs, hub carriers and brake callipers.  The front shocks with chrome-plated springs were pre-assembled by Westfield.  We set about bolting the whole lot together. The chrome-plated wishbones were pre-fitted with bushes by Westfield, except the RH lower wishbone weren’t.  This was our first contact with Chris Masters. “Send it back and we will replace it”.  The new one arrived mid week in time for us to continue building the front suspension at the weekend. 

Bolting the suspension together is fairly straight forward, following the build manual. Making sure to use enough but not too much copper slip on the mountings and bolts. The last thing we want is a squeaky suspension. We experienced a small problem with the RHS upper ball joint. The ball joint was a bit stubborn to do up, refusing to seat, and continuing to turn, whilst trying to do up the lock nut. We put this down to the epoxy coating on the upright acting as a lubricant for the taper joint on the ball joint.  Once we removed the powder coating from inside the hole, such that we got a metal-to-metal joint, we were successful.

With both sides assembled it was time to fit the steering rack. Make sure you have the recommended number of screw threads showing at the track rod ends and bolt it in plac

We were admiring out handiwork when we noticed that both upper wishbones had a dent on the inside face hear the rear mounting bush.  Both were identical could this be a designer dent?  We were pretty sure that it wasn’t.  The second call to Chris Masters – “ No dents, send them back. We removed the upper wishbones and did as we were told.  So the chassis sat there for another week whilst we awaited the new parts. Once back the rest was simple. Refit the wishbones. Connect the Aeroquips to the callipers and the result was as shown in the photograph.  At this point I have to say that working on the chassis mounted on Westfield chassis stands was a good idea. It saved a lot of backache and made accessibility of the underside of the car very easy.  

The rear suspension was where the fun and games started. None of the mounting bushes for the rear wishbones or the diff were fitted.  They were too tight to be fitted by hand and we did not have access to a hydraulic or pneumatic press. Our bench vice wasn’t big enough either.  Time to improvise. In my toolbox was a flywheel puller acquired when I fixed the gearbox on, firstly, my wife’s and, secondly, my daughter’s, Metros.  This had some nice long bolts that would pass through the centre of the bushes, some large penny washers and washers taken from the Sierra rear wheel hubs (Any similar heavy duty washers would do) we made a bush insertion tool.  The penny washers acted as packing pieces to ensure we did not run out of thread on the bolts. The heavy duty, Sierra hub washers acted as “jaws”. We threaded half the penny washers on the bolt followed by one of the Sierra washers. Passed the bolt through the bush and the housing in the wishbone. Placed the remaining Sierra Washer and penny washers on the other side of the housing and complete the assembly with a plain nut.

 Align the bush and the washers with the bush housing and tighten up the bolt. With careful alignment and a fair amount of force the bush is pulled or pushed (depending on your point of view) in to the housing.

It was necessary to disassemble the puller and repack with more washers during the operation to avoid running out of thread. But it worked. The first one was hard, having got the bush half in there was no going back, it seemed jammed, but  we persevered and fitted the bush. It got easier as we progressed through the remaining bushes. Cleaning the epoxy coating out of the bush housings helped.  We repeated the operation on upper and lower wishbones on both sides and on the Diff mountings on the chassis.

The bushes fitted; we needed to fit the rear shock absorbers with the suspension springs. We threaded the spring over the shocks and compressed them with a couple of tyre leavers inserted between the coils, placed the spring seat on the assembly and tightened up the lock nut a few turns to ensure the spring was well seated.   The Westfield build manual guided us through the rest of the assembly without a hitch.  

We had had the diff in and out during the fitting of the brake and fuel pipes down the tunnel. The bushes had been fitted using our bolt insertion tool described above. It was just a matter of holding the diff in place whilst someone else inserted the bolts

 Since we stripped the Sierra rear axle assembly, the Lobro joints had been bathing in petrol to degrease them and clean them up.  We had obtained fresh grease and new rubber boots from one of the local Ford dealers. We had 2 new drive shafts from Westfield, which had been treated with anti rust primer and silver Hammerite paint to match the diff.  We rebuilt the drive shafts, re-assembling the Lobro joints, packing them with new grease and fitting the new rubber boots.  We had new metal retaining clips for the boots as part of the refurbishing kit. These proved unsatisfactory, they seem to require a special tool or pliers to tighten them up and then flatten a loop to hold them securely in place.  We started out using these and compressing the loop with ordinary pliers but they looked untidy. Then we broke one and turned to using plastic cable ties. This was so successful we replaced all the metal clips with cable ties.