Carrying on from the post yesterday, today began with the expectations of accomplishing 2 simple things:
- Replacing the front brakes/rotors.
- Cutting out the battery tray to finish off the battery relocation
Easy enough right? Yeah, that's what I thought...
I started off with the brakes, as they were the most important thing. The battery tray is realistically only cosmetics to please the piggies.
The first thing that needed to happen was to pull the spacers off. The front hubs are 4-stud (standard for the s13), and I used 4-to-5-stud spacers to a) allow me to run my wheels off the s15, and b) fill out the gap in the guard created by using said wheels.
What's unfortunately happened though is that over time, the heat from the brakes has fused the lock nuts on the spacers. Try as we might (using a rattle gun, spraying the crap out them with Inox (you can see the puddle of Inox underneath the rotor), using a massive breaker bar), we couldn't undo the nuts... 'We' because I needed an extra person to press the brake pedal to stop the hub from rotating while I tried to undo the nuts. Long story short? Rounded all the nuts... yep. Dead end. So onto the battery tray.
This was the hole I was hoping to sort out. It doesn't look so bad from the top, but underneath shows a completely different story. Told you it was a dodgy job right? =P
Removing a battery tray is simple in theory - you drill holes where the factory has spot welded the tray to the chassis, and then use a crow bar or something similar to lever the tray away from the chassis.
Never hurts to use PPE :) Glasses, muffs and gloves make Clinton a responsible boy!
Yep so the theory was sound... this was my progress after 3 hours =\
4 hours saw the easy half out. A tone of drilling, crow-bar-ing, dremel-ing, mallet-ing, chiselling, and grinding... the biggest issue was that the battery tray seemed to be made of metal that was 3 times thicker than the chassis that it was tacked to. What this meant was that I was tending to tear the chassis whilst trying to twist off sections of the battery tray. Tearing metal for crying out aloud!! Maybe I'm in the wrong profession =P
Here's what's left of said battery tray...
And whats left of what's not left of said battery tray ;)
You can see here just how fragile the metal on the chassis is... the tears, the rips, the oddly shaped drill holes... I'm definitely going to have to plate this up once I'm done to reinforce the chassis. On the bright side, it will look a hell of a lot cleaner once done! It's also going to make tidying up the hole a tonne easier. There's still some bracket left on the side of the chassis rail (top of the photo) which will be tidied up (hopefully) tomorrow, but all I'll say is this - screw doing this job ever ever again!
I decided to go back to the brakes conundrum with what little daylight I had left... After hitting a dead end with the rounded bolts, I had to get creative... That spacer is basically sandwiching the rotor to the hub - very frustrating given that I needed to replace that rotor in the middle!
The alternative? Well, there aren't many, I'll say that much. The only thing left is to remove the hub, and then drill out the studs. It'll wreck the current studs, as well as the locking nuts for the spacer, but if I want to replace these brakes, that's what's got to happen... and I can't do a track day on shot brakes - I did that back in April and it took a lot of fun out of the day! This poses another issue too - I can replace the studs, that will be pretty easy. But a 4-to-5-stud spacer is not so easy to come by. If I can't get one of them in time, I'll have working brakes, but no wheels to fit.
I began with the task of removing the hubs. Once again, more breaker bars, more Inox, and more rattle guns. Alllllll going well until I had to remove the ball joint at the bottom... yet another brick wall. Out of daylight, out of energy and out of ideas, I think that's as good a place as any to leave it for tomorrow - watch this space.
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