Tuesday, January 21, 2014

RS Revival: Control Arms

When we were doing suspension on the RS project car last fall, one of the things we noticed was bad bushings and ball joints on the control arms.  You could feel it when you turned the wheel, as you could feel a little steering resistance in hard turns.  Part of the idea behind working on this car wasn't just to get it fixed, but to improve it, too.  So instead of simply replacing those parts, we opted to upgrade to Group N bushings with Aluminium Control Arms.

The passenger side swap was flawlessly easy to do, but the drivers side was unreasonably bad in comparison.  As with many of the issues on this car, rust was the name of the game.  We blasted through with some rust remover and a torch to free things up again.  To get to one of the rusted bolts, we proceeded to take the wheel off the axle, which was also rusted together.  After getting all of that apart, we wire-brushed and restored as much as we could with those components to avoid future problems.

On the up-side, my garage is now "mine".  I had a roommate for a short time in the new house who used the second spot in the garage for his Dodge Charger, but now there's a warm place to work on the RS.  I've also Subaru-ified my garage with an old '04 STI poster and some other older promotional ads I got when we were cleaning out the dealership.

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