Hi , I am about to tackle the upper and lower front wishbone bushes , seems to be not too difficult . The upper wishbone rod has to be tapped forward to remove , but first the brake sphere has to be loosened and moved . What i am contemplating is to have a replacement shaft made that is threaded both ends , so loosening the brake sphere is not needed to be done when the bushes need to be done in the future. Any thoughts .

 

Hi nightstalker,

Your plan should work as long as the new shaft is threaded only at the ends and is of an appropriately strong steel heat-treated and tempered to a degree appropriate for suspension duty.

In order to replace the lower wishbone bushes the coil spring must be de-compressed and the spring pan disconnected from the lower arms. Do you have a plan for de-compressing and then re-compressing the spring? Because the spring is mounted in an arc, traditional spring compressors cannot be safely used. The options most of us have used are to make a compressor from a length of large threaded rod that mimics the function of the Jaguar dealership tool, or to use four lengths of M8 threaded rod with nuts in place of the four spring pan screws.

The large images at Jag-Lovers have still not been transferred to the new servers, but you can see thumbnails and descriptions of the spring compressor I made at the link below. If I were only going to use the compressor for one job, I would just use a stack of large heavy washers as the thrust device instead of going to the trouble of drilling the large steel ball.

Front Road Spring Compressor Construction & Use

Cheers,

Don

 

You may find that "tapping" in reality becomes some serious alternate heating and hammering in a confined space. I've done several of these and worst case scenario is dropping the front suspension to free the bolt.








As Don advises, you need to give serious advance thought to spring compression. This is the Jaguar Tool:




A very substantial piece of kit. I prefer the genuine tool but many members have fashioned an equivalent from threaded bar.

Graham

 

thanks for the reply , i have a mate that is an engineer who is going to make me the spring compressor and the bolt for the wishbone , hopefully all goes well .

 

I just recently did this on my 94. Using a long rod of all thread and assortment of nuts and washers with 4 other bolts as guides. IIRC it was about $20 in misc hardware. I used a hardened steel roll pin on the top of the threaded rod to lock it In place. It held up well IE the tool worked but if I had to do it again I would get a longer pin and the hardware grade all thread might only be good for a couple of uses. Considering the Jag tool is probably $400+ even replacing the whole setup is money well spent.

Getting out and all apart was pretty straightforward. I ended up cutting the flanged portions of the bushings off with a hacksaw and borrowed my friends 12 ton press to push the bushings out and back in using sockets as presses. FWIW I took close up pics of the bushing placement and that helped min making sure they all went back in the same direction.

Getting the spring recompressed was more tedious than anything as you have to align the holes on the bottom plate.