Productive evening, control arms and idler arm bushings in.

[andrewro]

I threw out my back last Saturday so I've been hobbling around some and haven't been able to do too much with the 2002. Tonight I felt like working some so I installed the control arms I POR-15'd and cleared last Friday. I felt good enough a few days ago to do a little benchwork so they were ready to go. The steering arm to ball joint area was such a lump of rust that I bought another pair of steering arms so I could get on with things.

Before:

And After:

Installed:

And:

I also removed the old idler arm bushings, which looked almost new, and replaced them with the new ones I ordered a few weeks ago. For this I found it convenient to use one of the control arm - to - subframe bolts, along with its washers and the smaller of the two spacers, as a press. This got them almost in, then I switched off a bit and used one of the old bushings as a spacer to get the new ones all the way in.

After this I washed the bird poop off the car. All in all, a very productive though easy evening, and I managed not to reinjure myself. Tomorrow I will go retrieve my strut from the shop where I had a broken bolt extracted, clean out the current wheel bearings and decide whether to repack or replace them, and mount my new rotors.

Andrew

[Supergeek]

Your gonna love the way you 02 will handle, Andrew. I did this last weekend to the front end of my 02. New ball joints, bushings, Bilstein sports, Irelands stage 1 springs and 22mm swaybar. OMG! My 02 is cornering so fast its freaking me out! Now its really hard to stay off the gas!