**** UPDATE 19.05.08 ****I decided to bite the bullet and have a go at changing the wishbones.
They arrived from the Buypartsby.co.uk in very quick time, delivered to work as they had to be signed for, at £59.08 inc vat and delivery for the pair.
I started the job, with the help of my works engineer, at 1730 on Friday afternoon. All went well, to start with, the nuts were easy to get undone with my trusty Aldi air impact wrench, although the pinch bolt was tight and had to be done by hand.
From that point things didn't go to plan. We decided to start with the drivers side, purely because that was the closest side to where we were. The old part came off with a bit of wiggling and quite a bit of sweat. I offered up the new part and couldn't work out how to get it in the rear mounting.
Mistake No.1 Having had difficulty in getting the rear bolt in I decided to put the ball joint in and then work on the other two bolts.
Mistake No.2 Having not been able to get the hole in the rear mounting lined up properly I decided to put the bolt in the top and tap it in to try to line up the holes. This resulted in the bolt becoming stuck fast. At this point I decided to jack up the wishbone to compress the spring, my new spring compressors were too big to fit the narrow gap between the spring and the car, all this did was lift the car off the axle stand and still the wishbone wouldn't line up at the rear mounting.
It was then decided to take the whole lot out and start again. By this time we had been on the task for about 3 hours!!! I finally managed to get a short
1/
4" ratchet with the correct size socket into the top of the bolt and gradually unscrewed it from it's stuck position in the top of the rear mount. After 'breaking' the ball joint the wishbone was free from it's previously precarious resting place.
Time for a cup of tea and a fag and a chance to reevaluate what we were trying to do.
This time it was decided that the only way we were going to get this thing to fit was to pull the hub out of the way and to fit the rear bolt first, followed by the front bolt and finish with the ball joint. This time, success, everything went like a dream.
30 minutes later we were finished. Sadly it was now 9.30, the factory was closing in 30 minutes (I never had my keys) and, to my dismay, the pinch bolt thread was well and truly stripped. Only enough time to quickly refit the wheels, drop the car off the axle stands and do up the nuts with my friendly engineer sitting in the drivers seat. The pinch bolt will have to wait until Vauxhall at Truro have one in stock, as will finally getting to torquing up the bolts properly, as will fitting the passenger side. Finally got home at about 10.30, knackered, dirty and thoroughly cheesed off.
The good news is that the knocking sound has gone.
or should I say raspberry.