3/24/00 More suspension work  

It was finally warm enough at the shop today to paint outside. The sun was shining, and the temperature reached the mid sixties. I’m no longer relegated to the confines of the garage inhaling paint fumes, but now can do this outdoors! I arranged the last few pieces of the suspension that needed painting, and finished them off. I’m pretty close to refurbishing all the front suspension parts, so I’m looking forward to seeing it all go back on the car. We ended up buying the needle bearings for the front king-pins from Partsource because finding an alternate supplier proved too much trouble. $98 bucks is the retail price for all the needle bearings, but at least I’ll know they’ll fit, and I won’t have to replace them again for another 35 years! (It’s cheaper if I look at it that way.)

Once the needle bearings arrive in the mail, François wants to assemble the front suspension without the springs to make sure the travel of the control arms is free and not binding. It will be far easier to spot problems in the suspension travel now rather than later with the force of the spring acting on the suspension. Once he is satisfied, we’ll take everything apart, and find a way to compress the front springs into their buckets.

I got new polyurethane dust boots for my tie-rod ends. They’re a perfect fit, and will do a better job than the stock ones they’re replacing. The problem I’m going to have now is whether I should replace all the rubber boots or just the ones that have cracked or split? The polyurethane boots will last forever, and will do an excellent job keeping grease inside the boot, but they will not look like original Ferrari equipment. Originally, I was only going to replace the inner boots, and put the best rubber boots on the outside tie rods, so unless you looked hard, you wouldn’t see the non stock boots, but when I saw how nice the poly boots were, I had a change of plan. I’m going to go with durability over aesthetics.

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