Slow Progress
Progress has been slow lately. I’m still waiting for parts from Factory Five, I was on vacation for a week, I had a setback with the powder coating, and I forgot to take some parts to be coated.
Before I left for a family ski vacation I dropped off 34 parts, including the control arms, to be powder coated. I decided to have every bare steel part powder coated (including ones which are completely concealed).
I returned to pick up the parts only to discover that stating that “the ball joints are already welded in the control arms” wasn’t enough information for the powder coater to do what was needed. Upon opening the bubble wrap, I noticed that they hadn’t masked off the ball joints when they sandblasted the control arms.
Depending on who you listen you, this problem ranges from a major inconvenience to a complete disaster. I had a well-respected senior forum member provide me with a procedure to clean them and a well-known powder coater tell me that the ball joints are now junk.
With nothing to lose, I decided to try to clean them out. The provided procedure is:
- Spray a lot of brake cleaner through the hole for the grease fitting.
- Follow up with flushing it with Simple Green.
- Install the grease fitting.
- Flush with grease until you don’t see any more sediment. You also need to “work” the joint and wipe out any sediment in-between flushing with more grease.
I chose to use “Green Grease” brand grease solely for its light green color. This made it easy to spot the black particles of sand and dust. It took several hours and two tubes of grease to clean each ball joint. Also, the brake cleaner attacks the powder coating, so it needed to be wiped off immediately after each spray.
As you can see in the pictures, the cleaning procedure worked, but it added a few days onto my build time.
This past weekend, I began assembly of the front suspension. My plan is to use string in place of the front shocks until they arrive (should be here in the next couple of weeks). I had to clean dust from the powder coating process out of the threads of the tubular parts using a brush on the end of my Dremel, but other than that most everything else went together fine. The only problem I had was that the mount for the rod eye had to be “spread” (with a breaker bar) in order to accommodate the rod eye.
I’d intended on finishing the front suspension assembly, but to my dismay, I discovered that somehow I missed having the bushing sleeves (used to mount the lower control arms to the chassis) powder coated.
I dropped them off today and hope to have them back my mid-week, at which point I’ll pick up assembly of the front suspension.
