Nissan weekend #4

...And then a holiday weekend to boot, so I had TWO full days to work instead of merely one.

Given that I'm well, crippled and all; two days DID seem a bit ambitious. I can't really say TOO much except that I *do* indeed feel like shit, and that I did NOT get nearly what I had hoped for accomplished (a first so far that I guess I'm going to need to start getting used to). My "goal" for day one was to get the front end rebuilt, and for the most part I accomplished that much (day two was to be for installing the engine kit). I had a shitload of screw-ups, setbacks, and "what the fuck" moments that I had to work around, but at least I made it through reasonably intact. I didn't get the rack and pinion completely installed until Sunday morning ...but once again; Murphy's law in action. After chasing my own tail for a couple of hours, I was just able to finally realize at the later hour Saturday evening that I simply wasn't thinking clearly, and I'd be doing us all a favor by waiting till the morning to finish.

Mom & I got there Friday night, but I started on the car Saturday morning; this was Mom's first time out since I've had the car there, so she came out for a while and watched. I took the wheels off, and feel a bit silly now for not taking any "before" pictures of the front end with the wheels off. Strangely ...the before pictures don't really mean two toots to ME, but the "sake of posterity" should have been in my mind. I had the entire front end stripped and on the floor in about an hour though. I have little doubt that I COULD have done the entire front and rear suspension had I not taken the time to sand and clean everything, then paint it. All that work probably isn't going to mean very much when it's all said and done ...I guess that it might seem at least a BIT more impressive to whomever I have align the front end though (maybe that counts for something; I'm thinking that the undersection is probably going to look reasonably pretty). I'm considering having Rick bring me back the oil pan to polish like I did the valve covers ...it had never occurred to me while I was there, and I'm just not sure it's worth the trouble. It WOULD look awfully purty though.

So anyway ...dropping the suspension was almost nothing. I had detached all the pressure hoses on the rack & removed the power steering pump on weekend #3, so it was mostly drained of fluid except for those few little leftover drops that only come out once you are laying directly underneath it while removing it. I thought it was almost amusing that I wasted so much time during that first three hours literally waiting for paint to dry.

...but then came the snag. That HUGE fucking snag that kind of fell on me out of the blue. Vandalism and theft are pretty lousy snags, but stuff like that are a whole different classification. Those are beyond my control, and that special tool I have back in my toolbox at the other brother's house in Southlake doesn't mean jack in those cases. I toodled around with little stuff until the paint dried enough on one of the lower control arms enough to go ahead and install the bushing that I had already conveniently knocked out (and that "well, I did one side, I might as well go ahead and do the other" mentality that I became so familiar with doing the stinking valve covers came back to haunt me). I set the arm in the vice, and went to the big "box-o-parts" and pulled out the pretty new prothane bushings and thought "...wow, these bushings seem sort of small and why don't they have the metal sleeve on them?"

I set the bushing into the hole that I had knocked the old bushings out of, and sure enough it was too small. I rummaged through all of the other parts thinking maybe I mistook them or that those were the wrong ones (silly, since the place I ordered from sells parts ONLY for my make/model). ...and then I noticed that fucking slip of paper (TFSOP) in the packaging. The TFSOP told me that I needed to clean out all the "innards" of my old bushing and re-use the OLD metal sleeve; holy fucking shit ...thank goodness I hadn't used an air hammer to take the thing out (okay ...so maybe leaving a lot of my shit back in Southlake isn't quite so bad after all)!

They just sent the inner part, and I needed to slip it into the old outer shell. ...bastards!!!

First thing one needs to understand is that the bushing is an outer metal shell fused with a hard rubber inner lining fused to yet another metal sleeve that the attaching bolt goes through; the key word here is FUSED. It isn't as though you can just squirt some wd-40 in there and push it out; one needs some sort of press unless the bushing is actually bad (in which case that outer shell is generally fucked anyway). Figuring out how to get the innermost metal sleeve pushed out was the very definition of "clusterfuck" and set me back quite a while. I guess the upside was that my other parts had plenty of time for the paint to dry. Half of them anyway ...I could only paint parts that I already had disassembled, and I only had ONE vice (I was tempted to take up smoking and drinking again just to add to that number)!

It was also a very important lesson that "the cripple" here needs to keep in mind the next time he starts thinking about making a trip out during the week by his lonesome sometime.

I ended up using a small socket that was about the same size as the inner sleeve, and two larger sockets on either side of the outer sleeve in the bench vice as a makeshift press. A really large socket for the outer part would have been awesome, only the vice wasn't LONG enough for that to happen (grrr). I used a long extension with a deep-well socket to turn the crank on the vice (which I bent the holy crap out of in the process); I generally had the inner socket buried about half to three-quarters of an inch into the bushing before the bonding would finally break. The problem with this method is that the outer edges of the outer casing would bend under all the pressure and it would sorta...

ummm

...fly apart. Sending four metal projectiles all over the place at a high rate of velocity in the process. It took me nearly two hours to do the first bushing; it flew apart numerous times, but once the inner sleeve was apart I used a chisel to cut out the bulk of the rubber lining out, then a wire wheel attachment on my drill to clean out the last of it. Trying to press the new prothane bushing back into the old sleeve was nearly impossible until I realized that the inner metal sleeve on the new prothane one was removable. duh. (I guess there had to be at least SOME improvements)

I put the nice and painted control arm back on the car, and damned if that red prothane bushing didn't look awfully purty in there. There wasn't a fucking thing fucking wrong with the fucking black rubber fucking bushing on the OTHER fucking control fucking arm, but that fucking red fucking prothane looked damned fucking good. I'm suddenly having deja vu about having to keep looking at the one polished valve cover to convince myself that it would be worth it to do the other one.

I took the first strut apart and painted it while I mostly cussed about "pretty fucking red prothane." There was no margin for error on the strut spring compressor, or I would have taken apart both struts for painting just to have given myself more time to cuss about "pretty fucking red prothane" ...I guess that this trip just needed to make up for relatively smooth other ones though (a karmic thing I suppose). I went on to the second lower control arm while the paint was drying on the first strut. I knocked out the bushing and set the vice back up again as a press when Mom came out with another glass of ice water for me.

Right about the time the whole thing flew apart (for the first time on THIS side). As I think about it NOW, I have to wonder a bit about all those times on the other side, because this was the first time I really dodged (or something), because I hit the stool for the workbench when ...ummm ...something happened. I'd like to say what that "something" was ...but I honestly don't know. Something hit my forehead ...I have no idea if *I* hit my glasses trying to shield my face, or if it was a socket or the bushing that caught me ...I was honestly more concerned about the stool that was right behind me when I took a step backward. I think I might have pulled it up and sat down when Mom first brought me the water, but I really don't remember.

All I really remember is that the guy with no sense balance stepped backwards, tangling his feet on a stool in an area surrounded on three sides by large hard objects, any of which that a 210 lb 6'3" guy falling on full tilt would probably have meant a trip to the emergency room ...40 miles away. THAT was the thought that was in my head: ...FUCK, I'm going to the hospital. Not "Owww my head" NOT "duck Mom!" I just didn't want to go to the hospital; I guess it's good to have priorities.

I think I bobbed and weaved trying to regain my balance without falling for about seven hours (well it FELT like that long anyway). I can't say how I did it, but I didn't fall down at least. When I finally got control of myself ...Mom informed me that I had blood trickling out of my forehead though, that trickle soon became closer to "gushing." Mom decided that she'd better go find a bandage for me.

I did what most guys who have no sense of balance that just got impacted in the head hard enough to cause gushing blood and almost falling in a manner that would have almost certainly brought on serious bodily injury would do in my same case. I tied a rag around my head to keep the blood out of my eyes, found all the parts, and set it all back up in the vice and tried again.

The bonding gave on about the 3rd try, and the bleeding had mostly stopped by the time Mom finally found the first aid kit and got it out to me. We are most definitely related.

It wasn't very long after this incident that the BIL was most likely pressured by my well-meaning sister and mother to come out and keep an eye on me. *sigh* He couldn't believe the crap about the bushings. He busied himself on some projects of his own while I put the other control arm back together, and then re-assembled the one painted strut, and disassembled the other one for painting. Re-installing that strut was a bit amusing ...you have to use a huge prybar to push down the lower control arm to get the lower part of the strut to slide into the lower ball joint housing. I had certainly changed enough of the struts to remember what a complete bitch THAT was! ...it snapped in on the first try: perfectly lined-up even; the bolts slid right in. What are the odds on that?! I then got to work on the rack and pinion while waiting for the paint to dry on the second strut, and discovered the second fucked up part of the front-end experience (and there wasn't even TFSOP to tell me the full extent of it). One of the bushings for the passenger side of the rack was completely circular, as compared to the two piece for the drivers side.

This little detail was destined to make me lose a lot of sleep that night. This particular rack & pinion was a bit odd in that it doesn't COME with new bushings ...just about every rack in existence comes with bushings when you buy a new one. Well ...all but this ONE. I knew this was the case ...I'd heard other tech's bitch about this particular rack on many occasions (it's also used in Maxima's I believe), but I'd never had the pleasure of replacing one myself. I KNEW that it was fucking near impossible to change out without jacking the engine out of the car a good ways; that was the main reason I had delayed on changing the thing for so long in my own car (it had been seeping for ages). It was a snap to get at the bolts with the engine out though.

So. A circular rubber bushing that fits around a circular rack that a clamp attaches over, affixing it to the subframe. no big deal.

well ...so it's no big deal unless you count that there is an inner tie rod bellows and a hydraulic hose extension on one side and the steering linkage on the other, and it goes in between the two.The blue shows two angles of the left side bushing (see the big steering knuckle extension further to the right?); ...the red circles the right side (the two bolts are on either side of the clamp) and you can see the hydraulic lines and extension for it.

I looked at the old rack, and there was the bushing ...in the middle of the rack with no seeming way for it to get there without having to dis-assemble the rack to install it. What kind of fucking idiot would design something like that?! (I even pushed away the bushing on the old one to see if "Remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima MOTHERFUCKER" was written underneath). I fussed, I messed around with ...I even fixed some problems in the steering linkage that had been around since I bought the damned car, but I just couldn't come up with ANYTHING as a solution for how to get that fucking bushing in without cutting it (and CUTTING a $50 bushing is just wrong on too many levels to even discuss).

I assembled the other strut and found that the odds on the other strut snapping in as easily as the other side was somewhere in the vicinity of "infinity to one;" I fussed with the silly thing nearly 20 minutes before it finally went in correctly. I installed the last of the front end "stuff" and called it a night. One might think that poor little atrophied me would have been a little bit SORE after a day like this one. One might also think that getting up a ladder into the upstairs loft of a tiny cabin carrying a 20-something pound dog would be damned near impossible for a poor crippled dude who had finished a day of doing a bunch of stuff he shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

There is a fine line between "impossible" and "damned near impossible" I learned.

I was asleep almost the second my head hit the pillow, but woke up around 3 AM wondering what kind of fucktard would design a rack with a bushing that had no way to be put on without a bunch of disassembly.

It was a long night.

After morning coffee and such, I went out and looked at the rack and the bushing ...disassembled the fucker and slipped the bushing in. It sounded a lot harder to do than it really was; it took about 15 minutes all told. Sometimes it's just a hell of a lot easier to simply fix something than it is to figure out why it was done in the first place. I think there is a "coffee cup saying" in there, I just can't figure what it might be aside from the old "give 'em a chance to be an idiot and they'll take it every time."

I spent a bit longer on Sunday morning working on getting that really easy rack in than I'd like to admit. I think it was partly because I just saw a lot that needed to be done, and partly because I was just moving slow. I had it all nice and installed when I noticed the tires were turned a bit to the side while the steering wheel in the car was straight. I remembered a little too easily what a bitch it is to move the steering linkage while the engine is in the car, so I fixed that part in a hurry.

finally all done

I guess it was approaching noon when I finally got around to the engine. BIL's Dad had given him a new parts washer for his birthday, so I had something to clean parts in at least. I had figured I'd try to have the whole engine put back together on Sunday, but in retrospect ...that was probably just a BIT too ambitious. I took apart the first cylinder head and set the stuff into the parts washer to soak. When I was taking apart the valve springs and got down to the valve guides ...I remember asking my BIL if he thought it was worth it to change out a part that not only was there nothing wrong with the old ones, but also looked like a real bitch to change; and all simply because they just gave you new ones with the engine kit.

Hell, I knew the answer ...if you are THAT deep into it and you have the parts, then of COURSE you should swap them out. A week later when I took the cylinder head to the machine shop to remove the guides that we had royally fucked-up trying fruitlessly to remove ...not only did the machine shop dude ask why the hell I wanted them changed in the first place, he told me I damned sure didn't want to use bronze guides (what they gave me with the kit) if it was just going to be a street car. He said bronze generally lasted less than 50K and probably wouldn't be a good idea to use at all.

swell.

Mostly the rest of the day was a clusterfuck. I tore the engine down almost all the way; I didn't mess around with trying to take out the crankshaft or pistons though. There was some fairly light scoring on cylinder #5 that I didn't want to get into without having a cylinder hone (the other tool I had forgotten ...and it turns out later that the one I already had wouldn't have worked on my engine anyway). I had known there was going to be a lot of trouble getting the timing sprocket off the crankshaft and was correct in that regard ...I had brought my "just in case" tool along for that very occasion and was happy I had done so. I remember telling Mom on the way up that the one tool I WISHED I had brought but didn't was my ball joint press though. It may have saved me a lot of grief on the control arms, it may not have helped at all (spilled milk ...crying). I didn't get much accomplished with my "day two" activities though, and I guess I was due; things had been going TOO smoothly up to this point I guess. I did what I could, but mostly wrapped things up before four in the afternoon.

It may not have been a complete waste of a day, but it really did sort of feel like it (as I think about it, it also felt like I had been run over by a bus most of the day as well). The cylinder heads are at the machine shop as I type; I just elected to let him go over them with a fine tooth comb rather than take any chances on finding out the hard way later. We'll see if they're done in time for the weekend should I decide I have the lead in my ass left to do anything. We shall see.

...and the saga shall continue.