So then yesterday..
Let me make this completely clear. I wanted to do something else for a living yesterday
I get one of these days roughly once a month. Lol these days are where literally everything you touch goes wrong
I am an honest chap and I don't mind admitting I completely got overwhelmed and flustered yesterday due to things going pear shaped.
OSF coil spring on a BMW 1 series. To tell you the truth this was a 1.5 hour job according to Autodata. It took me from 9 til 2.30.
that's 4.5 hours with my lunch in between
So the shenanigans kicked off when I undone the wheel bolts
put the locker in and blasted it..... it started spinning. But with little resistance I thought "hmmm either that was ally loose or that's just stripped". Yep. Stripped the dudes locker. Luckily we have a set of BMW lockers. Found the correct one and undid it with a bar. It was on there sooooooo tight. And then gave him the one out of the set.
Bastard
Here's a first glimpse at my arch nemesis...
Here I've removed abs wire, drop link, pinch bolt etc. But note the amount of shock absorber that comes out the bottom of the knuckle. It was never going to simply knock all the way down so I had to remove some stuff and that's when my day got shite
Here's me in an action shot
of removing the TRE nut.....
When I say removing... I meant undoing it til it spun
in this situ I normally use the gearbox jack to push the TRE ball joint up in to its mount and that allows me to buzz the nut off......
....not on this car
Eventually after far too long pissing about with it I decided to carefully cut the nut off. This took ages too but eventually came off. New nut found in magic bolt draw
Then thumping the knuckle down more revealed I had to remove the odd shape control arm visible in the last pic. Of course, the nut span again 😩😩😩😩 the nut was below so this time I didn't even bother trying anything different other than cutting the nut off again..... another load of time spent on that (I really must perfect that technique....though to my credit I didn't damage either of the threads....though still ran a die over them later on to be sure).
The bloody thing still wouldn't knock down far enough and I could see it's cos the other control arm was stopping it from coming down. So undertray off and loosen the bolt/bushing so it could allow the knuckle to drop all the way down....
Finally I relieved the strut out of its home and buzzed the three nuts off up top to claim my prize.
I was pretty cheesed off at this point and decided after 2.5 hours to go on lunch.....to come back to the Pete tong stuff continuing
I can laugh now but at the time I could have committed murder
So to sum up the next events the spring wouldn't sit in the compressor properly due to its odd shape n size. So I put the bottom of the strut in it and buzzed the nut off. This is quite frankly dangerous but I did take all precautions (chain round it). The top mount pinged off and went everywhere. Luckily the bearing stayed in tacked. So fought with getting it all back together.....to realise I'd missed out a washer that allowed the top mount to spin really easy 😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😩
So back again with my precarious spring removal.
By this point I enlisted the help of the boss cos I just wanted this job to be over. So after this I was chief torch holder while I got a lesson in what experience really counts for and we got the thing back in. I reckon I lost a stone in sweating
After all this I felt really dismayed and frankly quite down like I was useless. I don't like to be defeated. But some times these things do happen and I soon had to pick myself up as I was in on my own today
..........