I tried to be nice . . . I really did.

In case nobody has noticed, I've been trying to be a good boy over here. I haven't used bad language that offends Dusty in months, haven't made Angela feel bad or done/said anything else to offend.

I asked a VERY reasonable question over at TheSamba, and took all of the insults thrown from Dale, right up to a point, right up to that little tipping point, then . . . well . . . those anger management courses went right out the window, didn't they.

Check it before it's deleted:

http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=440134

You are an angry man Mr. Evil

Why no, not all all really. I never carry a weapon, don't really like guns at all, never even served in the military.

Although . . . I DID fight in the Fashion Wars in the early seventies. Wore bell bottoms jeans for four grueling years just so the our returning Vietnam vets would have the right to wear Men's Fashion Flairs and turtle necks in the workplace without embarrassment or ridicule from the management.

While not "over there" I WAS over here, trudging through the water and mud of the Boston Common and sitting through class with the lower five inches of my pant legs soaked with rain and caked with crap.

All told, I'm a very peaceful individual with the prescriptions and medical bills to prove it.

TC - there's nothing wrong with 'Say what you mean and mean what you say'! WRT the banter on the Samba, well you know how it is on websites....Everybody is a frigging expert! It's different strokes for different folks and you just have to take it all with a grain of salt.

Thanks Jim, I sorta just flipped a bit because these Select-a-Drop beams just fell into my lap, and I knew that Manx was all over them, both at the beginning and now returning to them, but MAN (! ! !) are they ever clumsily designed ! ! ! The center section of the top beam is literally cut away from the rest and left to float there up against two half-round shells. It seems that the upper tube integrity and strength is simply eliminated from the equation.

If the drop spindles fall through, the ball joint one will go into the Fiat project and I'm putting all of my faith into that front end. I REALLY NEEDED some genuine info on the pros and cons of this old tech and that smart ass gave me nothing but snot, even from the beginning he seemed to have an attitude.

Well, a little push turned to shove and I bit him. There will either be a Smart A$$ed reply or the post will get edited or deleted, but the other contributor certainly answered my question(s) with everything that I need to decide, so it was worth the grief.

I KNOW that I used to be a bit of a Smart A$$ myself here on occasion (but these days I'm a sweetheart, aren't I ? ! ?), but my tech is always solid and my advice can be banked on, no question, and I'm not gonna get anyone killed or have them piss away a ton of time/energy/coin restoring and installing and plumbing something that either won't do the intended job or possible fail them under use and get them hurt. That punk didn't even seem to realize that I was asking about the Select-a-Drop.

So THERE ! ! !

Drop this...............

TC wrote: "I've been trying to be a good boy over here. I haven't used bad language"... (and read your post on the Samba)
Now I feel better cause I thought there was an imposter or you stumbled upon a bale of bad ass weed :~) ~Alan

That was funny.......lots of information but they never answered your original question.

BTW Scrap Iron is worth about $250Nt / $.125LB. on the west coast.

Iron scrap weight is pretty good around here, we're doing great with old boilers and oil tanks. I just pulled my father's old in-ground/out-ground pool apart and have a bit over 2,000 lbs of clean aluminum to scrap next. Most of the lengths are 32x4' and 3" thick, the remain are 8x5'. I need to cut them into "box length" before I can scrap 'em, but the payday will be worth the effort.

My machinist friend Randy has eight ( 8 ) 55 gallon drums filled with years of crushed beer cans. The drum(s) are so heavy you can't hardly budge it. He's just wait'n on aluminum going high $.

Two summers back, one of the car junk yards (saying "salvage" yard would be stretching it a bit) out on one of the Sea islands decided to give it up. The guy was pushing mid-late 60's and no longer had the interest he once had. He contacted one of the scrap metal places in Charleston and they sent down three HUGE car crushers. Two weeks later, 2147 cars had been crushed, removed, the yard area groomed with a metal/plastic screening system and then the top 24" of soil was replaced (I would guess that the yard area was 10-12 acres).

After all that, the guy netted $1.7 million!!!!

Nice retirement income, that!

Tom: I read through the Samba posts and I agree with others on here; It would have been nice if you got some straight answers without all the extra BS. There are ways of installing those adjusters without butchering the original tubes (or losing all of the strength of the tube) but lots of people took the easy way and just cut the tubes up and left them like yours.

gn

Hey Gordon,

One of these days I'll figure out just what's up with the folks on TheSamba, it's honestly a cultural and sociological phenomena. They're a different breed, but somehow also interested in automobile and tech and DO have some solid info . . . but it's like mining uranium; hard work and very dangerous to get at it.

Just SO weird.

Anyway, I'm planning on welding a second pair of half round shells on the other side of the center cut tube section, I think that this will help cup the center and keep it from moving about for the most part. I'm also going to sew up a nice leather gaiter to enclose the center, keep the dust and grit out and the grease contained. Plus it'll look kind of 1930's race car with the brown base ball glove leather against the gloss black and Hammertone gray beam and trailing arms.

The question of ride is gonna be a mystery, but if it isn't what I want, I'll trade for some lowered spindles and save the beam for a reverse trike (Morgan-style) that I'm noodling at. So far I have a tube frame and a set of genuine Morgan knock-off wheel caps, an aluminum seat, and an interior fuel tank (looks like what the Moon tanks evolved out of) from a TBF Grumman Avenger for that one.

I ALWAYS start with the little things, and work my way up to a car, or a yard sale, later.

I just pulled a beam apart last week for parts. As far as I can tell, it was left outside for a while or it had been used and then sat for a looooong time.

Anyway, it had nicely installed Avis adjusters, but water had infiltrated somehow such that the inner trailing arm bearings (you know, those "Mercata" bushing thingies on the inside ends of the trailing arms) were rusted fast to the trailing arm races. It's impossible to really heat those things up, so I had to use a BFH (like an 8 pounder) to pound the trailing arms out of the torsion tubes.

Not fun...

Fortunately, I'm retrofitting the trailing arm bearings with Urethane replacements, so I just took a suitable piece of pipe and pounded the inner bushings in beyond the ends of the trailing arm races and "forgotaboutem".

Now that the bushings are in place, I've drilled a couple of through holes in them and installed grease fittings such that I can shoot some grease inside the urethanes at all locations. Nice huh??

gn

Geesh Gordon, sorry the beam you got from me was a bit of a pita but the "price tag" tasted good. ~Alan

And I thought that I was the only one to use that grease fitting/drilling through the urethane insert trick . . .

It works great, no more squeaking. I had a little trouble getting the arms all the way in so that the grub screws engaged the outer torsion bar indents (the inserts have squared up flat ends where the trailing arms have an inner taper) but a little sandpaper and done, sweet, beauty, and RED.

TC, I thought the Samba gig was well-worded; courteous, even.
What a numbskull!

On the red urethane jobbers ... last year, Teresa had the DS trailing arms fixed up nicely. Last week, I tightened up my tie-rods and took a wrench to anything loose in the front end. The only remaining maintenance item in the front half of the car is now the DS arms, specifically the beam's inner bearings on the lower arm.
They're just a touch too far inside (hammered in with a BFH and a piece of pipe after the narrowing of the beam) and it really would simplify my life to put the urethane sleeves in.
Since we know I can't go to the Samba for advice ...
How do we like the red urethane hoobeydoos?

I turned to the urethane inserts as a last resort. The original beam in my Ghia convert was badly rusted and had broken free at the ends, using a tow bad had resulted in a bent lower tube. I had a replacement, but it had been left open to the weather without the arms in place and I didn't like what I saw inside. The urethane inserts saved me. I bet that this is the same with a lot of folks who end up using them.

The old "bearings" were barely there and slid into the center section Easy Peasy and the inserts slid right in as well. The arms were a problem because the urethane was so hard that I couldn't get the outer edge to conform to the inner chamfer(?) on the arms and ended up using a sander to conform the edge to match that of the arms.

PERFECT.

Then, like Gordon did, I popped the inserts back in, drilled through the hole where the zerk fitting went, removed them and enlarged the hole, put them back in and used a longer fitting to "lock" them in place.

Slide the arms in and done. The indent in the leaves matched up with the hole for the grub screw pretty well for a first timer. When I do it again, I'll make sure that the hole, the indent, the amount of re-contouring and the oil hole are all taken into account at the beginning and adjusted as I go, rather than do each process out of necessity and frustration.

I'm going to use them in this lowered beam for sure. Folks complain that the ride quality suffers, but other than aluminum spacers and collars, nothing currently available/for a price/already molded and ready for purchase, locks down the suspension movement like urethane.


I LIKE 'em ! !

Okay. And the grease keeps them from making squashed urethane creaking noises, I hope?
I might have to get a set of them. Instead of jamming the old bearings further into the beam, though, I think I might pull them out and have the option of using new ones as a Plan B.
I'm not sure if narrowing the beam would prevent using those inserts. How long are they? Anybody got a before-and-after picture?

Don't have pics, but the top one is a single, collared piece about 7" long, while the lower ones are two-piece; An Inner one that is collarless and has a tapered end (it goes in first and I tap them in place with a piece of pipe) and an outer one with a collar to allow it to seat against the end of the tube.

Measure the torsion tube end of the trailing arm for where they will sit inside the tube (close inspection of the trailing arm torsion tube end will show a taper towards the inside end - THAT is where the inner urethane bushing will sit once installed. Dry fit everything and it'll become obvious. The position is not necessarily the same as what the installation instructions show, but it'll become obvious when you dry fit them to the trailing arm outside of the beam.

Then measure on the outside of the torsion tubes and drill the holes for the grease fittings. Get threaded fittings with about 1/4" of threads.

Once the holes are drilled in the torsion tubes, slide the inner bushings in place (assuming you've already pounded the Mercata bushings in beyond the ends of the trailing arm tubes - measure the tubes to make sure the Mercatas are in far enough) and drill the same size hole in the bushings (hint: Stuff a rag into the bushing with a long screwdriver or something to catch the urethane drillings and just pull the rag out once drilled).

Then tap the holes for the grease fittings and install them. The depth of the fitting threads will keep the bushings in place, and you now have a convenient hole for the grease to get in there. You can also used normal, molybdenum grease, just like a stock front end.

That's it.

BTW: I got Porthane bushings and they offered both red and black so I got the black ones (the rest of the chassis black, too).

If you wish to remove the Mercata bushings, the VW book shows a VW tool that looks like a piece of pipe with a off-set washer on one end. Push it in til it clears the far end, catch the washer lip on the bushing and pull it out (they show something like a slide hammer being used to extract it). I might suggest that you drill out the dimples that were holding it in place originally, as they'll prevent it from sliding past and out.

How come when I say it, it sounds funky and weird and like too much trouble, but when Gordon says pretty much the exact same thing, it all makes sense and seems like the best way out.

Probably 'cause he throws in the cool grown-up words like molybdenum and shit. I think that I'm gonna have Gordon do all of my thinking out loud from now on . . . help organize my thoughts.

Oh, and definitely go with red. ALL of those fat guys that smell like chicken soup at the VW shows will go bat-shit crazy for the red urethane, and they'll ALL tell you that they SQUEAK!

The guys, I mean . . . not the urethane.



http://www2.cip1.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=C12-6524-21

That comes from many years of BS'ing my managers to keep my job! ;>)

BTW, I should point out that Al Merklin was kind to me and my current build and donated a front beam with drop spindles and I got exactly what I wanted from it, so I'm happy. The Beam (with Avis adjusters already installed) and spindles have worked out well.

All of this other silliness of dealing with rusted fast bushings and tie rods and such just goes with restoring any old, rusted whatchamacallit with mix-and-match assorted parts, and my being a perfectionist trying to get it right, now, so I only have to mess with it once and not change out a lot of stuff later, as I did on Pearl 8>(

I'll try to get some pictures once the tie rods and disk brakes are mounted so y'all can "ooh!" and ahh!" at it. Getting prettier every day. (The pan, that is....)

gn

Tom: I bet you can draw better than I can write......

I'm jus' sayin......

Thank you both. I'm about to do my first adjustable beam swap & need all the descriptive detail I can find.

These urethane thingies are better than the bearings they replace then?

Ed:

Who knows?.....The stock outer bearings are roller type, are easily replaced and seemed to work very well for years and years if they were greased once a year or so.

The inner (Mercata) ones are just bushings made of some kind of metal. They wear out after 15-25 years and must be replaced, just as Urethane bushings need to be replaced in the same interval (and outer roller bearings too, for that matter).

If you grease either metal or urethane bushings regularly, they'll both last for years. However! Normal Urethane installation only greases them at installation with silicon grease and it seems to dissipate in a couple of years, leaving them dry, so they get pretty stiff (difficult to move the trailing arms up and down) and then they squeak (or groan, or croak, or screech....take your pick). Installing the grease fittings as TC and I've done eliminates all that.

I'm doing a beam swap right now on my build, so if you have any questions, don't be afraid to post or email me.

Gordon
The Speedstah Guy from Beaufort

Will do.

I am currently re-replacing (after 2 months) all 4 ball joints, a needle bearing, and a bent control arm. Just got everything re-installed last night. I have always wondered what the stock angle is as a baseline, I have adjusters in both top and bottom beam. finally! Thank you for being an angry person TC, i was able to get some valuable info out of it!

Congrats, Paul. And yeah, thanks, Evil one.

Brilliant -- thanks, guys!

TC wasn't angry in that thread....He was just futzin' around.

When he's angry you're PC starts to smoke and smell funny and the screen starts spewing out sparks and displaying pictures of Bill the Cat...