so today we did the upper A arms, tie rods and rack on my car. i'm sure the others who helped me would agree, it's a giant PITA. the daym banjo bolts are freaking hidden like a ****. had to grind away half of a 22mm socket to get it small enough to fit. i want to thank ImTheDevil (jeremy), jiggleo (mark), bill and keith for all the help i got. nobody could do this job alone. you'd give up way before you think about finishing. other than the banjo bolts, my pinch bolt came out really easily as i've already done the A arms 2 years ago.

now, the car handles like a ****. every little turn from the wheel and the goes obeys instantly. i can actually break the tires loose doing 20 down the road and jerking the wheel. next up is an alignment. the driver's side tie rod is about 1 or 2 turns too far out.

 

For sure, the guy that designed the positioning of the banjo lines on the steering rack deserves to be hung by his ***** and beaten with a rack. Anyone who is going to replace their rack - search online and everywhere and see if you can find 20 and 22mm ratcheting wrenches. No matter what they cost you, they'll be worth it, as you have almost zero room to move a ratchet in there. It sucks. But as Hiwords said, the effort is worth it. Chalk up another win

 

alright !!!! glad to hear it is all good now after all that. I have learned one thing........... If mine needs to get done I know a little Asian guy to hire for it lol. Hey guys it was great couple of days and we banged out two cars. Besides, we had to break in Bill's new garage.

 

Agreed, it was a good time and my thanks to you guys for working with me on my car too. Now I just have to get that CA kit and we get to redo all the work we did on Mark's car last month, using mine this time

 

I'm jealous. You guys have too much fun up there lol. Jeremy, did you ever get those coilovers on? I assume the reference in your last post was to an adjustable control arm kit to sort out the camber/toe issues associated with goin real low? Lets see some pictures!

 

We have a blast up here. You have to make the trip sometime. The CAs I'm talking about are the FCP Groton kit - mine are shot. I have a bad outer tie rod on the passenger side so I'm going to replace both outers as well as my right rear wheel bearing. My car will be golden then. Our job on my car this weekend was a coolant flush and new thermostat to replace the old one, which was stuck partially open and costing me a lot of wasted fuel mileage. And we did find out that the 30v (and therefore presumably the 12v too) thermostat can be changed without removing the timing belt, top center pulley, or even the cooling fan. It's kind of a pain to remove the coolant channel plate over the t-stat since it's very close behind the timing belt but if you slide the belt about halfway off the passenger side exhaust cam sprocket, you can maneuver enough to do the job. It's a pain but not nearly the job that Yu's steering rack was.

And yeah, I put the coilovers in the same day I got them. I'll get pics up of that soon.