Front Suspension Rebuild—Overview
Mark SimpsonDescription
While production automobiles have been offered with independent front suspension for over 100 years, the style and configuration of the various components has continued to evolve. It’s true that many early models used a beam-style axle, but this was largely a holdover from the time cars resembled little more than the carriages that inspired them.
Although most classic cars utilize the same basic components for their front suspension and steering, over time these components wear and fail, even on low-mileage cars that have spent the majority of their time in storage.
It is important to regularly service, repair, and replace items like ball joints, bushings, and tie rod ends; otherwise they will fail and make your car difficult to drive—or worse yet, fail completely and create a potentially life-threatening situation.
When Mark Simpson restored his 32,000-mile car, a quick visual inspection of the various components revealed little apparent wear. Once the car was on the road again, it soon became apparent that there were issues that needed to be addressed. Excessive play in the steering, squeaking, and grinding noises in the suspension, wandering in the lane while driving, and squealing tires while cornering made it clear the front suspension was in need of service.
Although the front components initially appeared fine, after a few months of driving, the old, hard rubber in the bushings was crumbling and falling out, the ball joints had become looser, and there was dramatically more play in the car’s steering.
Rather than closely inspecting each component to decide which ones to replace, Simpson elected to replace every front suspension and steering component, with the exception of the steering gearbox itself. This complete-car approach to upgrading the front suspension will ensure the car delivers thousands of miles of trouble-free service.
Even with a low mileage car, when you're restoring it, you really should consider rebuilding the front suspension. And our problem with our 57 desoto here, you know, that we looked at the bushings as we were first putting it all together, looked at the front suspension and everything looked good. It was a 32,000 mile tire. We figured, what do we got to lose? Let's just try what we have. Well, here's the payoff. We ended up, you know, running it and as, as we drove it, the suspension started getting looser and we started noticing some weird stuff going on in the front suspension. We knew it was time to actually go in, rebuild the front suspension. And when you rebuild the front suspension on a car, you know, you don't want to just pick, you know, for me, it's like you don't want to just pick one component. You wanna pick one ball joint that maybe just, you're gonna be driving the car for a long time. You want to stiffen it up, you wanna make sure the car runs and drives like new. So we've opted to just go in and replace every component starting with these bushings. This is the upper control arm bushings on the driver's side. And while physically, it looked good in the car, soon as we started to actually use it, you know, we knew there was something wrong and we could pick up a little bit of wiggling in it. Now that we've got that upper control arm out. We saw that. Yeah, pretty much. The bushing had just failed and the way it fails is that rubber gets hard inside the bushings, whether it be the lower control arm bushings, the idler arm bushings or the upper control arm bushings. When the rubber gets hard, it starts to, as the, as the suspension articulates, it starts crumbling and flaking away. And we found that to be the case in all of our bushings, the upper control arms, you know, if you compare an upper control arm bushing the way it's supposed to look, it's, it's night and day, you can clearly see it has failed. Another thing we found is that our torsion bars were actually getting weak and we, even though we had the suspension turned up all the way, it was still sitting kind of low in the front. So we sourced a set of N Os new old stock torsion bars that, uh, and these are actually a little bit heavier in weight there. It'll take a little more weight than the, the stock ones it had. So give us a little bit of firmer ride plus, give us back some of the adjust ability and ride height. In addition to that, we're gonna replace all the bumpers. The, uh, front suspension bumpers were getting cracked and they were, they're cracked and the new ones are soft or rubber because they're not dried out and hard and, you know, we'll have, you know, a better cushion there when we do bottom out the suspension. So we get the bumpers replaced, we'll replace the tire rods, we'll replace the inner and outer tie rod ends and sleeves and this will help tighten up our steering. So we don't have any play. You know, it's a big problem with a lot of these old cars. You know, all these bush, there are so many different ball joints and bushings and knuckles on everything where everything gets a little, just a little bit of play, but together they kind of add up and eventually you've got enough play in the system. So you're driving down the road like this, not a pleasant driving experience. So, with that, you know, we're gonna replace all of the components in our front suspension on this project. Let's get started.
Share tips, start a discussion or ask other students a question. If you have a question for the instructor, please click here.
Already a member? Sign in
No Responses to “Front Suspension Rebuild—Overview”