Hi all, I posted this on my local Miata club site this morning and thought you guys might find it funny too.
Well, I finally got a weekend free (until easter sunday) to install my new suspension. A set of Tein Flexes and energy suspension bushings. I had Friday off as my first paid holiday of my job since being taken on, so I planned all day Friday and Saturday. I could go at my leasure and have fun with it, and since this was my first time playing with the Miata suspension, going really slow would keep the stress level down. What follows is my timeline thus far.
Friday morning finds me with one of my sinus headaches (I get these a lot in the spring now with the frequent pressure changes my sinuses are getting old guess) feels like someone punched me in the eye, but it's not the worst one I ever had, so I pop some exedren migraine and make a hot water bottle and hope for the best. I relax and stare at the clock, because of course time flys when you want to get started on something are incopacitated. Lunchtime rolls around and I have some soup, good news the headache is starting to go away, by now its gone 1:30 and I start reading from 3 different sources to see the easiest way of removing the control arms, this suprisingly helps the headache abate more.
2pm the car is up on jackstands and wheels are off, access to the rear top mounts done, and I've marked the suspension adjustments with a sharpy so I can get a reasonable faximile of alignment back when done. Also now notice that I've likely been running around for the last 14 years with not much of an alignment at all, since the rear alignment marks seem like they rather haphazardly all over the place. So much for the factory alignment. Note to others with miatas go get a proper alignment on your car right now! You will probably enjoy much better handling. Don't trust the cars alignment from the factory or dealer to be good.
Ok back on track, after marking alignment points that probably will yeald an alignment one step up from a grocery cart, I move on to spraying the nuts and bolts with WD-40 and liquid wrench. I'm not expecting too much resistance here because the car is a garage queen, and they visually don't look too awful. After looking at the front suspension I notice that the boots on my tie rod ends look a little tired, oh well thats pretty minor and only the ones on the tie rods look bad, the control arm ones are ok. Have to order some replacements for those.
By now its about 3:30pm and I've settled on Keith Tanners book as the easiest route to go for the process as he does this every day and I figure its written in a manner that is more DIY then the other manuals I have. His procedure is focused on bushing replacement as well the manuals are not. I start on the rear suspension per his suggestion. Drivers side rear starts ok, I remove the rear brake caliper and hang it along with the rotor to get to the axle nut. Keith says it will be hard to remove being torqued at 200ft lbs, Ok I think, not a problem I have a professional level impact gun with 600ftlbs of torque in reverse, and I've never had issue with any nut I've used it on........ Until now...with the gun on full grunt, the axle nut is laughing at me, obviously this was assembled in Hiroshima with more then spec by a pissed off worker, since it appears rather clean, no rust etc.
4:15 my friend Adam shows up in his 92 Miata, I'm ready for a break at this point anyway so I talk with him and measure his cars stance, since I like the amount his is lowered. ~12 from wheel center to fender with 15 inch wheels, ok back to work. Adam laughs at my axle nut situation, as I get the propane torch for some help. Finally after a combination of impact gun, WD-40 and heat I get the nut off, there was a tiny bit of corrosion behind the nut. Now at this point in keiths book there is a pic of him using a bearing puller to push the axle out, but the book says you probably won't need to use this, good thing since I don't have a bearing puller, so I try a couple of wacks with the rubber mallet.......and nothing, so I call my friends dad who has a puller I can borrow, of course he's not home, oh well I drive on.
5:30 My wife asks if I want to go to our friends house for a cook out. Since I'm not making the greatest of progress I say sure. We get in the car and go a block away from the friends house my daughter throws up in the car. So we get the friends house clean up the puke and then turn around and go home, fine maybe my friends dad called back....nope.
7:30 I decide to leave axle in place for now and remove upper rear control arm, get the control arm out without any trouble, and use a c-clamp to remove stock bushings, which came out very easily much to my suprise. So now I go to the bag of bushing and open them up. I get the bushings that go in the upper rear control arm, bushings go in fine, I put the metal sleeve in and notice that the interior diameter is way big, like the bolt that goes though will be bouncing around....... I do a quick inventory of bushings to make sure all are present and get out the Micrometer to measure the sleeves. To make a long story short I find that ES has bagged the kit wrong, I have sleeves for all bushings except the rear upper control arms, or more exactly I have 8 sleeves for the FRONT upper control arms when I only need 4. Thats right the good pot smoking folks at ES put two sets of front sleeves in my bag instead of one set for the front and one set for the back. I fire off an email to emilo at 949 and he gives me the Phone # to ES. So I have to call them Monday. Barring that I guess I could put the stock bushings on my lathe and remove the rubber and reuse the sleeve from that but why bother with all that! I decide that I'll just call ES on Monday.
Wow this is becoming a long post! So now it is about 10:30 friday night, and I decide to call it a night after I reinventory the rest of the bushing kit to make sure that the rear sleeves are the only thing wrong that I need to call about. I figure that I'll get an early start on it Saturday morning and put the rear on hold get the front done, then finish the rear when I get the stuff to finish. 04:30am Saturday morning. I'm puking my guts out.......and end up spending the entire day in bed. 2:30 Saturday afternoon friends dad calls asking if I want to come get the bearing puller, I tell him it will have to be another day since I can't get out of bed.
Today, I feel fine, of course but since it is Easter sunday I'm taking the kids up to grandmas to hunt eggs. Hopefully after next week I'll have all the stuff to continue..... thought you guys might find this humorous, but I'm glad I didn't do this at a tech day. Also note to anyone getting a set of ES bushings inventory the set as soon as you get it, as I had a similar problem with my friends kit for his 280z wrong bushings for the steering rack in that case. The bushings are great, but I think the guys in the bag packing dept at Energy suspension, smoke a bunch of pot.
Happy Easter everyone. Chris Rummel
