Day 3 - Anti-roll Bar Assembly & Right Hand Upright (3 hours)

The right hand upright arrived at work today (Thanks Derek at Caterham Dartford).

Job 8 - Anti-roll Bar Assembly

As I was home alone this evening I spent some time reading about the next steps and prepped the Anti-roll bar. During the preparation I noticed that there were some metal sleeves in the package, wondering what these were (as none of the parts are labelled by name, just part number) I typed the part number in to the Caterham online store and found that they were sleeves to go in the rear of the upper wish bone and the dampers! Doh. No wonder I had found the dampers easy compared to others!

Job 9 - Fitting Right Hand Upright

Following completion of the Anti-roll bar I decided I would look at fitting the right hand upright and sleeves to the front end. First of all I removed the uprated disc from the 2nd left hand upright and fitted to the new right hand upright. I then used my Clarke mechanics seat to hold the weight of the wishbones and disc whilst I inserted the sleeve into the upper rear wish bone mount. A bit of wiggling and the bolt was through and tightened. Whilst the weight was still being held by the seat I mounted then manoeuvred the top of the damper into position! Then the fun began!

After finding it so easy first time round, with the sleeve in place it became somewhat harder! I messed about (putting it politely) for the next 1.5 hours trying to get the bloody top damper bolt through, as others have said, its' location creates the challenge particularly when coved in copper grease. You can't knock it in with a hammer as there is no space, you have to screw it in, the problem is that it is a rounded allen key head so you have to grip it in your fingers and turn it far enough in that you can get the ball end of the allen key in and turn it at an angle! Until you get it far enough in it spins in the allen key bolt head. Grrrr. Once in the bottom of the damper needed some gentle persuasion with the rubber mallet to move it in to position, a much easier job. I torqued up the lower damper bolt to 20Nm using the torque wrench, not a hope in hell with the top one, so just tried to apply the same amount of tightness to that of the bottom, by comparing the lower torqued bolt with the top one!

I considered starting on the other side, but decided I'd had enough for this evening!