Now to the untrained eye this might look a tidy well sorted front suspension set up, So lets take it to bits and see what we find.
Mudguards came off easily enough because they were not exactly held on by that much! 
Anyway with them out of the way we could get stuck in with the Stub Axle's, Check out this double hole and the spindly nut and bolt that was loosly holding the two bits together.
SVA requires These rusty items are supposed to be M8's
They obviously know what a state the holes are likely to be underneath!
Once the stub axle and the rest of the suspension was removed look at what was left ! Looks shite doesn't it? I don't know about you but I would not have felt safe driving around in this mess.
Well at least some effort has been made on the Front Calipers, I wonder if the first builder thought a quick spray of silver paint will make the caliper work as advertised In actual fact It didn't work, both calipers were siezed solid, best place for them was Linco in exchange for some Reconditioned items.
Surprise, surprise the pads were shot as well.
Now this bit made us chuckle, I'm not really sure if the tape was there to mask the spray job or to cover the torn piston seal Either way its a Bodge job!
The disks were buggered as well, I cannot imaging why anyone who has made the effort to buy themselves a sports car should bother to fit these totally knackered bits to it. New ones only cost about £12 so surely thats the safest option.
This Disk even has a spring thingy jammed inside the disk, can you see it?
This is another bodge job on the Stub Axle. Originally on the Sierra the Track Rod End (TRE) fits from the bottom up, in this Robin Hood model it has to fit from the top down. Obviously this means the Tapers on the Stub Axle and the TRE are opposing each other. This builders solution to the problem was to...............Fit them anyway Apart from being totally dangerous it is another SVA failure point.
Our solution was to take the Components to a local engineering shop who are manufacturing a pair of Tapered Bushes for £25. What price do you put on Safety?
Here is the Tapered Bearing fitted to the Stub Axle, it is a tight fit but to avoid any turning when doing up the TRE nuts we have glued it and fitted a small grub screw which locates in a dimple on the bush to hold it solid.
While the stub axle is off we fitted the longer Wheel Studs and "Kurusted" the Rusty bits.
Now its all cleaned up we started to look at assembling it all to see what it fits together like, first thing I found was that the bottom cup did not sit flat against the bottom Chassis, I suppose thats what all them little slivers of steel were jammed under it before.
This was the solution we came up with we took a large washer cut it in half and shaved it to a taper. We then held the whole assembly in place so the cup was now sitting at the correct angle then we marked the holes through from the bottom.
And bolted it all together. Now the shaft sits straight up to the slot in the upper chassis member and you don't have to apply force to get it to line up.
The bottom end is assembled using a cut down damper snubber that stops the whole lot bashing down on the bottom bolts, should the car get airborne!
We have made some proper spacers for the top end of the suspension the ones that sit on top of the bearing, rather than using the original cut tube on the left we cut up some sections of thicker bar like you can see in the middle, We also trimmed it at a slight angle so it sat flat against the top Chassis, it still required a bit of force to push it into place but its now nice and solid
Here it is assembled at the bottom is the Bearing, then the spacer and finally a washer at the top to spread the load.
We have not bolted the top plate to the chassis yet, we will do that later when we set the camber.
Here is the front end assembled with nice shiney new bits. All thats left to do here is set the Camber when its weight on! and make the Mudguard mounting frame.
This is how we are mounting the Mudguard this time, Instead of using the "Copper Tube"
We have flattened out the inner tube, and slotted in some flat Steel Bar which was bent round close to the tyre. To take up the gap under the Mudguard we have welded on some steel box section onto which we will weld some nuts at the correct angle so we can just screw the mudguard into place when we have finished.
Here the two Frames have had a couple of coats of paint, You can see the Nuts welded in place on the box section.
Then we bolted it all in place then Manoeuvred the Mudguard into its final position then clamped it all up and welded the bar onto the flattened tube section.
Step forward a few weeks and guess what we have changed our minds about the "Sliding Pillock" front suspension. We happened to have a cutting blade in the Angle grinder and it just seemed to be calling to us "Cut them off", "Cut them off" so who were we to argue
We luckily managed to sell off the old bits, and will now be fabricating our own Double wishbone setup, using Joeys car as a model.
Shame we could not use the Stub axles we have, as you can see they have been trimmed at the bottom end so there is no monting for the lower ball joint, We ordered the Dummy stub axle and lower ball joints from Robin Hood and we have sourced a new pair of stub axles from Alan Birket in Scunthorpe (Thanks Alan)
