The Black Beasty - 1970 GT6+

    When I purchased The Black Beasty, the entire rear suspension was still MIA. Nothing you could call 'rear suspension' was even anywhere on the farm were the car was sitting. It was all 100 miles away 'misplaced' in a big warehouse/shop in the custody of a friend.  Well it took two+  weeks to finally get the title and rear suspension into my possession. Luckily  the friend was able to find EVERYthing that was missing.  To move the vehicle,  I had to install a 'temporary suspension' so we could roll it on the trailer. Luckily I had a pair of 1500 series swing axles, completely assembled I could drop in.  I only used two bolts on the diff flanges, coat-hanger wired the two trailing rods together (GT6 still in place and the axle had the stock Spit version hanging off it.)   As the two body mounted ends of the trailing rods are not in the same places, the angle of the mounts would not allow a simple 'bolt in' of the rods. After all, we did only need to be able to roll it on/off the trailer.

     Along with all the rear parts, (which showed up separated in L & R 5 gallon buckets), came  a pile of brand new rebuild parts. New trunnions, inner bushes, bearing and seals were all still in their little 'catalog' parts bags.  Everything went pretty well with rebuilding the axles. I even managed to track down one REAL Metalastic donut. I had to settle for a GM unit for the other.

    So after messing with the electrics, the rear lights, and some body bits, I finally got around to installing all the rear suspension components.  I started off simply assembling everything I could, up on the bench. The following photo is a comparison of the re-built roto-flex assembly, compared to the 1500 series longer swing axle assembly.

(upper=1500 series swing axle            lower= '70 GT6 rotoflex)

      Now this is where it got strange.  For simplicity, I bolted up the assembled  axle and a-arm assembly (as pictured above) to the diff first.  Then using a jack, I mated up the inner lower a-arm mount.   When I went to raise the assembly up to install the upper leaf spring bolt.... I noticed something a bit odd.

     OK...I figure lifting the spring will help close up the gap.  At first I was using a 3' crowbar and two muffler clamps to pull the spring up. The chain at the lower right edge of the picture, is my cherry picker pulling up on the crowbar. I've since built a 'real' tool as per the Bentley manual suggested tool design.

The axle and the donut are relatively straight. But look at the 
HORIZONTAL distance from spring eye to upright.

      It ended up taking a come-along (hand cranked winch) to pull the upright over enough to install the spring bolt. 

Look how distorted that donut is. Also not the alignment
 of the inner and outer axle sections (not parallel)

     Even after jacking up the lower a-arm, high enough to lift the car off the stands, it still didn't 'un-distort' the donut...that much anyway. (about 75% of the way up in the photo above) For a comparison, the following photo of my first '70 GT6+ follows......

(left side underneath of Goldie my previous 1970 GT6+)

...... update 1/7/05.....
     So.... where does that leave me.  ! ??    Well of course I turned to the email lists. A few questions about axle length and spring dimensions.... turned up some surprising info.  When asking about spring lengths, I got responses from 'they're all the same' , 40" eye-to-eye, 41.5" and a couple of  42" eye-to-eye measurements..  As to axle length, they seemed to be pretty consistent. I even got responses back with individual part dimensions, from people who went out and physically measured them for me.  

     Hopefully this Saturday I'll craw under Big Red, and measure the spring there. It really does seem like a 42" spring would be perfect!
       or.... will simply jacking the suspension fully up...line everything up better? Some how I just don't see the axle getting 'shorter' (less donut distortion) by raising it further.

   ...... update 1/9/05.....

   Well thanks one and all. Sure enough, some p.o. apparently purposely bent the finger of the uprights. Upon close inspection, I could not find a single hammer mark from their work. So I can only assume they torched the metal to cherry red, and simply bent them over.   So I simply did the same thing to fix the situation.

     I used a micro MAPP and Oxygen two gas blow torch to simply heat the fingers to nice cherry red. With the spring bolt in place, it was simply a matter of crowbaring against the bolt to push the fingers back over to their correct angle/position. It was kind of surprising how easy they were to bend!

Here's a comparison shot of  the pre and post bend of the fingers.

I put this comparison photo together, simply to show the LACK of distortion of the donut
after the fingers were bent back to their proper dimensions.
 

So... problems solved.....and I'm a happy camper!   :-)