What a hellish day. Or more accurately, what a hellish ordeal with the car. I’ll remember to revise my time-of-repair estimates to four<\/i> times as long as I think it’s going to take me, instead of the customary three.<\/p>\n
The problem was with the Audi’s lower control arm bushings. They were completely shot. To visualize them, imagine a small (1.5″ x 1.5″) cylinder made of alternating layers of steel and rubber (steel-rubber-steel) and you’ll get the idea. They’re an interference fit in their respective spots on the control arm, meaning they need to be pressed in and out. The control arm amounts to two steel stamping welded together, so it’s fairly robust. Getting the arm off the car was easy enough, getting the remains of the old bushings out and the new ones in wasn’t. We (Joel and I) first tried a tool that I had fabricated last weekend to do the job. It was spectacularly inadequate for the task, with the center shaft snapping in a matter of minutes. We then tried using the bench vise with the remnants of the tool–no dice. Finally we had to get out the sawzall to conquer the bushings, a controversial decision since I was hesitant about using such an imprecise tool, fearing that we’d cut into the control arm itself. As it turned out we did, but by being very careful the damage was minimal. After sawing through the outer sheath of the bushings we banged them out with an old screwdriver.<\/p>\n
The new bushings I thought I could just lube up and install, but they were the hardest task of the day. They’d go in about a quarter inch and stop. We tried using the bench vise. Nope. We tried hammering. Negative. I bought a propane torch with which to heat up the ends of the control arm, in an effort to make them expand for an easier fit, and we reassembled Joel’s dad’s leaky bottle jack and used the base of the engine hoist, turned on its side, and a makeshift frame for a DIY hydraulic press. Even that didn’t work. It was only when we used the floor jack, propped up in the same frame, that the bushings finally went through, and even then there was some complaining from the metal.<\/p>\n
That done, I banged the control arm back into its place on the subframe and starting bolting stuff back together. Everything was going smoothly enough until I went to reattach the tie rod end. The threads were completely stripped, as were the ones on its nut. I removed it from the tie rod, put it in the bench vise (that thing came in handy today) and tried to rethread it, to no avail. I had to impose on Joel for the umpteenth time that day to drive me back to the apartment so I could get a new tie rod end (which I had sitting in a box) and drive back and install it. That took way too long, but it worked, and I drove the car home. The alignment is a little off (I need to give the tie rod end one more turn, I think), but I’ll go outside and fix that shortly.<\/p>\n
The big casualty of the day was whatever semblance of a social life I have. I was supposed to have dinner and a movie with friends in Cary, but between exhaustion, frustration, the distance to drive, and just the lateness of the evening, I missed out. <\/p>\n
There are things to be thankful for, however:<\/p>\n
a. cell phones
\nb. nobody got hurt, even though we were applying several thousand pounds of force to a piece of metal in a very makeshift arrangement of tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What a hellish day. Or more accurately, what a hellish ordeal with the car. I’ll remember to revise my time-of-repair estimates to four times as long as I think it’s going to take me, instead of the customary three.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}