Right, so. As some of you may know, my Clio's steering rack was leaking fluid and track rod ends were completely shot. No more.
After 8 hours of hell between three of us, I now have a new steering rack, tie rod ends, and have the car driving as God (Jean Ragnotti) intended.
As you can see, there is daylight in this image. Observe how that changes.
Subframe out. Wasn't too bad a job.
Commencing on dropping the steering rack. This is where the pain begins.
Dropping the steering rack was hell. The fluid left in the system after we'd tried draining it kept coming out onto us, and a couple of stuck threads meant that in the end, we had to physically crank the steering rack while spannering out a set of bolts the other way. Everything on it that could seize, had seized, and this would've worked out far less agony than taking off the stuck lines and rerouting everything between the rack and the pump. My favourite bit of this one hour job was the four hours where it turned into eight hours.
Busted out the oxyacetylene torch on a couple of occasions to cook things loose and managed to not combust myself/the car/the entire industrial estate in the process.
Donor rack's track rod ends didn't particularly want to budge, so they got torched as well.
Subframe back on at 1AM, with all of us now doused in PSF and very tired. Nonetheless, we prevailed.
Put an alignment straight on as in spite of counting turns on the track rod ends, the Clio had hilarious quantities of toe in. Now running about 0.9 toe out on the front. Test drove it afterwards, nothing fell off and the car feels great. No more bumpsteer, no more marking my parking spots by leaking PSF everywhere, and no more need to buy shares in Comma Oil because I'm buying PSF weekly.
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Corporate wants you to find the difference between these two images.
Massive thanks to Wiffen and Dovey for doing this until like 2AM. On a Thursday.
Very fortunate to have good friends willing to tackle projects of this magnitude and level of silliness.
