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- Removing the rear traililng
arm
(by Kyle)
The first thing I discovered
about this job is that it requires quite a bizarre collection of spanners
and/or sockets. In fact the bolts which join the chassis and the rear
axle to the trailing arm yield to a 16mm Metric spanner while I found
that the respective nuts preferred an 11/16ths Imperial spanner! I have
incorporated these spanner/socket sizes into the drawing below for ease
of reference. It’s possibly that other imperial sizes work as
well but I always try the metric spanners first.
Your first job should be to jack the back of the car up. It is better to jack up both sides to the same height so as to prevent the body twisting, particularly if it is a Drophead Coupe and the doors have been removed to enable fitting new wings as on my car! Remove the road wheel and place an axle stand under the back axle as close to the wheel hub as possible on both sides of the car, taking care not to crush a brake pipe. Now place an additional axle stand on another strong part of the chassis of the car (the sill ridge is the handiest but it must be sound). The reason for the extra stand is that after all the bolts have been extracted the car will drop as the spring is no longer pushing it upwards. At this stage you can save a lot of elbow grease by dousing the relevant nuts and bolts with lashings of WD40 and leaving it to penetrate for about 10 minutes. The next action is to remove the anti-roll bar from the trailing arm. For this I used a 17mm socket and a 17mm combination spanner. The bolts came away very easily. Now remove the nuts from the two remaining bolts at the front and rear of the trailing arm but leave the bolts in situ.
At this point of the proceedings it can be helpful to raise and lower
the jack under the trailing arm almost imperceptibly to relieve spring
pressure until you reach a point were the bolts will come away easily.
After that place the bolts and nuts in a safe place, remove the trailing
arm downwards being careful to avoid the swinging anti-roll bar which
will catch on the arm and that’s it, Robert is your Mother’s
Brother. Easy when you know how! Why am I doing this I hear you ask? Well
I have been getting a mixture of a crack and a thud from the rear of the
F.H.C. under braking and accelerating and have diagnosed the cause to
be a worn bush on the trailing arm. Rather than put a new bush in I am
swapping arms with the project car which I know has decent bushes and
for which I have a full set of polyurethane bushes for later in the restoration.
Additional: It turned out that the trailing arm wasn’t at fault but its neighbour the rear tie-bar was (yet again a worn bush). Unfortunately I didn’t catch this on until I had already put the exchange arm in the FHC, so I had to start all over again with both cars. Still, having this helped me do it in a third of the time.
