55 HT Project Page 7
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Still messin' with the rear suspension....
Page 4 of the body off work....
The rear suspension setup was starting to look good, so decided to pull off those springs
and clean them up and paint them, then put them back on so I can fit the CalTracs...
When I got them off, I found some severe corrosion near the middle of the main leaves,
did not want to trust this car with this much corrosion on the rear springs, so looked for some new springs....
Found some new '55 Chevy rear springs, and these are labeled as 2" lowered. They are 5 leaf packs
like the old ones were. Notice the rear spring eye is curled up instead of down, that alone will lower it a bit....
These leaf retainer clips are mild steel and fairly easy to open up and close again, but as I only wanted
the main leaf on each side at this stage, I broke them all the way down....
Couple of good chisels and a hammer is all it takes....
Lookin' good so far....
Not sure at this point if I will just use the main leaves, or use two leaves on each side.
The CalTracs go on the front, and there were these heavy duty poly bushings in the front,
and for some reason there were no bushings in the rear, so pressed out the front bushings,
and pressed them back in the rear....
The CalTracs have a steel bushing that goes in the spring eye in the front, so had to press those in ....
This steel piece fits the rotating piece of the CalTracs, and fits inside the steel bushing I pressed into the front spring eye....
Fitted onto the front of the spring....
Ran into a small problem on the second CalTrac, the smaller steel piece fits too tight into the steel bushing I pressed
into the front eye of the spring, will have to loosen that up a bit, plus where this all mounts under the frame,
needs some modification before it will fit properly.
Later....
Got that second CalTrac pin and bushing loosened up so they fit together ok, now I needed
to open up the front of the steel box the front of the leaf springs were mounted into, as that's where the
CalTrac front piece needs to be able to rotate forward and up against a piece mounted on the frame....
Using just the main spring for now, the axle mount from the CalTracs is slightly off as the wheel side hits
the brake backing plate, I need to grind some clearance into those CalTracs mounts to clear the brakes....
After cutting out the front of the front spring mount box, the CalTracs piece fits in there nicely....
Still need to figure out what I am going to put there on the frame just in front of the mount
for the CalTracs to hit against when they function....
This is about the ride height I'm thinking of....
As there is a slight recurve on the main spring leaf at this ride height, I'm thinking I'll add that small spring
mounted upside down, sort of like an "overload" spring, under the main spring...
I've mounted the front of the leaf in the upper hole in the spring mount box, and put the CalTracs
"push rod" in the lower position in the pivot piece, which gives a little slower action than the
upper hole would give with this rotation piece...
The problem is that I only have 3-1/2" clearance to the bottom of the CalTracs rotation piece...
Not Good....
So I put the "push rod" in the upper hole in the rotation piece,
and got 5" clearance after I trim off that lower piece of metal,
looks much better, and the action will be faster, but I don't think that will be a problem....
To get the ride height I wanted in back took about 200 # on the frame, but now it is in position
to set up the mounts for the QA1's. I won't be able to figure out the springs spec. until I
get the car all back together and weigh it at the back axle.
More Later
