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February 2002 Suspension repairs part 2

The car had been driving well enough but I felt that something was wrong with the handling. In these cases you tend to get used to the way a vehicle drives and need a second opinion to get a good result.

So I called upon a good friend and accomplished Tiger pilot in the form of Neil Wain. This might in hindsight not have been such a good idea. After a few aborted attempts due to Neil & Ian Martin overindulging we eventually met up on a cold January morning, with Neil, Patrick Annibal, Richard Appleby and Paul Swarbrick (three more tiger owners).

Now it has to be said that the car looked fine to me as you can judge by looking back to the front page as that is when the picture was taken. Neil however had other ideas as one check proved that I had negative camber on one wheel and positive on the other great for driving round oval racetracks not so good for normal roads!

It also had to be said that the tracking was somewhat out possibly a degree or more!

We then went for a test drive with Neil driving my car and me as passenger. I chose one of the more scenic (bumpy) routes, the driver had been sceptical of the power output claimed for the engine but soon changed his mind as we ended up leaving Paul's Impreza about 1/2 mile back. Once the test drive was over I came home and made a small shopping list to fix the car.

The shopping list

After some thought I came up with the following list of things to buy/do

It didn't look like that difficult a job or so I thought!

I ordered the polybushes from Rally Design and these were delivered by return.

Unfortunately I had a new catalogue of car parts sent to me, always a bad idea as they are a good source of "ideas". Well in this catalogue were a set of in-situ adjustable track control arms. These clever devices allow you to alter the camber of the suspension without having to dismantle anything first.

TCA closed TCA open

As you can see from the above pictures these arms extend well over 2 inches in length and allow you to play around with suspension settings easily. They can be sourced from Demon Tweeks or similar places but if you go direct to the manufacturers TAS then they are a lot cheaper.

Once the parts were all delivered I then had the nice simple job of putting them together. Now when looking at the pictures below please remember that the car was a little over a year old so the state of the internal frames was a shock to me. However the chassis soon cleaned up without any problems. A bigger problem was that a ball joint had siezed in the Tiger manufactured upper arm. This took a large stiltson and a length of scaffold pole to eventually force the parts apart. I then went and bought a suitable tap (」26!) to clean the threads out before refitting new ball joints.

The pictures below show the suspension going together and before anyone says anything I agree that the garage floor looks like a warzone!

Suspension Fully exposed Lower arm rebuilt on car Suspension rebuilt onto car