Lancia Motor Club
Model Technical and Interest => Fulvia => Topic started by: John.Morton50 on 13 February, 2025, 05:32:38 PM
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This is a cautionary tale for any overconfident amateurs such as me. I managed to completely mess up the reassembly of the front suspension such that I ended up with negative caster on the front wheels (ie like a supermarket trolley). I put it in to a local garage immediately after the rebuild that specialised in classic cars for a voluntary MOT, they insisted on changing a ball joint that made no difference at all, then gave me an MOT. The tester did say it felt funny to drive and told me not to let my mother in law drive it.
Driving it like this was very odd, the car had very light steering but no self-centering at all. Eventually I put it in to a local tyre shop that had a laser wheel alignment machine, they found the data for a Flavia to test it against. They got the tracking right which was an improvement and I got an A4 printout of the wheel alignment. The thing that jumped out to me was the negative caster of -12 degrees (WHAT?? it is supposed to be +1.2 degs!) Frantic internet searching on what caster meant (it is the angle relative to the body of the top to bottom wishbone ball joints), and what this meant to the feel of the car.
It slowly dawned on me that I must have mixed up the left and right hand upper wishbones when I rebuilt the suspension into the subframe. I had marked everything left and right when I took it all to bits of course, I can only think I mixed up in my mind what was front and back of the subframe during the rebuild. That fact that everything fitted convinced me all was well but not so! The lower wishbones can only go on one way so even I could not get them wrong.
Luckily everything came to pieces easily as it was recently rebuilt and greased up, and I managed to swap the upper wishbones over. I now have a normal car! The steering is now as light and precise as it is reputed to be.
John