To begin the conversion, you must find a good-condition MGB front suspension, and after several false leads Charlie pointed me to a guy named Bob who was selling all his stock after having a decades-long career restoring MGBs. He was bringing his remaining stock to the Carlisle Import and Performance Show in May, 2018. I contacted Bob, and he had just what I needed. We agreed on a price of $100, and he brought it to Carlisle, and Troy and I picked it up in his pickup.
By one of those cosmic coincidences, we encountered both Charlie and Cor at the show, and were able to send the front hubs along with Cor so he could begin the work of creating adapters to marry the four-lug MGB hubs to the five-lug TD wheels. That's why they are missing in the above photo. With their help, I also found some rebuild MGB brake calipers and new brake pads at the show.
Today, Troy came by the Grant St. Garage, and we disassembled the MGB suspension to give the front kingpins to Cor. There was an immediate problem, one I had been pondering for days. The usual way to release pressure on the coil spring so you can disassemble the suspension is to use a floor jack to compress it, using the weight of the car to hold it down. Obviously, when the suspension is out of the car, that isn't possible!
The Internet suggests various solutions, including using a floor jack and a chain to compress it, and just removing the shock absorber and letting things spring open. I wasn't comfortable with either of those. Using a standard spring compressor wouldn't work - it won't fit in the limited space available:
My solution was to make a fixture to allow the spring compressor to compress the inner coils of the spring. We measured, and a 9/16" bar would fit between the coils. I used a milling machine to mill a flat on each of a pair of 3/4" hex bars I had lying around. The flats make clearance to slip between the coils of the spring, and also keep the bars from rotating.
Here, Troy is compressing the spring. Note his tattooed wedding band - he did that after wrecking a couple of rings at work!
Yes, I know most folks don't have a full-sized milling machine, but this would be easy to do with a grinder or belt sander, maybe even more quickly than I did it with the mill. The sweet spot would be to use a 5/8" piece of threaded rod, and grind off the threads on two parallel spots.
Once the spring was compressed, it still wasn't floating loose, but the tension was so low that removing the shock was a non-event. Then the kingpin could be rotated out of the way and the spring released and removed:
The next step was to remove the kingpins, and both of the top links were REALLY stuck. No photos, but the hour-plus process finally involved a metal-cutting band saw and a 12-ton press. Once they were free, we started the process of cleaning. Here they are, a bit more than halfway done:
I'll finish cleaning them, then mask and paint them, and deliver to Cor for further work. The other parts needed came off without too much grief:
Those lower A-arms will be disassembled, cleaned, painted, and finally installed on Beck TD. Likewise, the anti-sway bar will be cleaned and painted, the links shortened, and Beck's frame drilled to install. Charlie and Cor tell me that modification absolutely transforms the TD's handling.
Does anybody need a 1970 MBG front cross member, denuded of components? Cheap! I guess the scrap man will give a few bucks for it...
I like to comment that it is Charlie Baldwin who deserves the credit to this convertion of the brakes, I'am just making the parts and putting it together from his drawings
ReplyDeleteCor.