Parts get all cleaned up!

Back for another edition.  With essentially all of the suspension out of the car at this point, we now had surprisingly good access to the bolts for the catalysts.  We had been wanting to take a look at it, and make sure they hadn't gotten melted.  After reading on the Lextreme.com forums that with a stock motor, you were actually better off having the catalysts, we just wanted to check their condition, and put them back in.  At the same time, we welded on a new flange for the rest of the exhaust, and went back to 2.5" tubing, rather then 3.0".

At this point my dad had brought back some refreshed, repainted parts and we began assembling the replacement bushings.

Everything looks so much nicer with a fresh coat of paint.  Should be nicer working on a less greasey car too.  Too bad the first race will likely ruin that.

More fresh paint and bushings on the traction arms.  We debated making our own adjustable version of these, but didn't want to use up the AIV dollars.  We needed that to cover our polyurethane bushings, since there was no way I was buying new arms with new ball joints, nor was I going to search long enough to find a fully good set of used ones.  Its worth the AIV for the bushings in our book.  Plus its actually cheaper for our team budget.

Below is the opened up, smelly, overheated rear differential.  Not too bad looking really.

But the "new" differential we got from the junkyard looks WAY better.  Thanks North Imports.

Mmmmm...now doesn't that look nice?  This is prior to adding the control arms, I believe we were missing something.

And BAM, the whole thing goes back up in the car, with are super rusty fuel filter...

Also while we had everything out, we took out the transmission pan and oil pans, to clean them up, and add a new transmission filter.  There wasn't enough time to take either out for inspection or rebuild.  Hopefully we'll do that after this season.

And the fronts suspension is going back in now too.  It also looks nicer, has new bearings, with high temperature grease.  So hopefully we won't have to replace those for a little while again.

The other side.

And we had some stripped out ball joints on the camber arms, so we had to order up some used ones from ebay, my 2nd favorite junkyard.  Didn't bother pulling and swapping the poly bushings on those though.

But after all that, we had the suspension ready for Road America in April.  More on that soon.