The Day We Said A Lot of Cuss Words
After last week we were all a little (ok, a lot!) defeated and were hoping our next build day would be nothing but sunny skies. Unfortunately, we were just sitting in the eye of the hurricane and had more trouble coming our way. Our group used another lifeline and phoned our T-Bucket expert about how exactly we should reinstall the rear end. Our options were: install the axle housing without the third member (lighter to hold up while bolting on) or install the third member back into the axle housing and then reinstall on the car (the much heavier option, especially without the proper jack stand pumpkin attachment.) We decided to go with the lighter (and hopefully easier) option.
After consulting our handy dandy t-bucket manual, we decided our best approach was to reattach the rear hair pins to the axle housing first. Then lift the whole axle housing up and attach the hair pins to the frame. Piece of cake… or so we thought.
Attaching the rear hair pins to the axle housing requires four, yes FOUR measly bolts. With #BucketBetty and #TinyT on one side and #HotWheelHoney and #PretTyInPink on the other side, they began wrenching the bolts that connected the heims to the axle housing. They wrenched, and wrenched, and wrenched, and you guessed it, wrenched for what felt like an eternity and made millimeters of progress. We finally got to the point of pure frustration and began beating the bolts with our rubber mallet and managed to get 3 of the 4 bolts in.
Luckily, some of our Speedway friends were floating near our “garage” area and offered us a bit of advice. Turns out, that pesky (I mean awesome!) powder coating made the bolt holes just a liiiiiittle bit smaller which made reinstallation a whole lot harder. After a swift whack of a hammer, our friend was able to get that last troublesome bolt through.
Remember I said we used our rubber mallet to take our aggression out, I mean… persuade the bolts through the hole? When #BucketBetty did some hard whacking, our brand new races swiftly fell out of the axle housing. After some head scratching, we made a decision about which way the race went into the housing. After we got the last bolt through, we decided to get those races pounded back in place. With another hard whack of the rubber mallet, #BucketBetty slammed the race back into the axle housing. It was at that moment our friend let us know that it was in backwards.
So now our brand new shiny races that caused us so much headache last week, were once again leaving a bad taste in our mouths. We had to get that little sucker out without damaging it, otherwise that meant having the races replaced again. Luckily, our friend came to the rescue once again with a trusty slide hammer. He managed to get the races out of the housing without damaging them! Finally a win!
The last task of the day was holding up the axle housing and reattaching it to the frame with the shocks and panhard bar. Fun fact, we have a traditional rear suspension not 4bar (thanks T-Bucket manual). #BucketBetty, #PretTyInPink and I held up the axle housing as #TinyT and #HotWheel honey tried getting the shock mounts into place. As if we hadn’t had enough bad luck for the week, the shocks would not go into place AND #PretTyInPink noticed we still had quite a bit of sand in the pumpkin. #facepalm
Up next week:
- Blow out the axle housing… again
- Suck out the excess sand with a vacuum
- Spray some brake cleaner through to get rid of the rest of the pesky sand still stuck in the axle housing.
At the end of our build, we managed to get the shocks in place. We felt like we should end on the high note of getting the shocks bolts on, so we called it quits.
The never ending saga of the rear end will continue next week as we figure out how to get it all cleaned out and then we’ll have to reinstall that crazy heavy third member. Wish us luck… Peace out girl scout.