Rear Beam Puller

[Alastairh 47]

I can't believe the drama you poor bastards have pulling beams apart. The salt must really make things a mess. I stripped a beam on the weekend. It took just 20 minutes.

 

If you know what your doing and have the right tools, you can drop them off the car and strip them in that time.

 

Majority of the beams i touch i just use the sledge. Wrapping an old rag around the arm tends to save any damage. I used 8.5 tons pushing some tb's out of a 1600 beam yesterday. It didn't half make a bang!

 

Al

[taylorspug 7]

Dont get me wrong, if its off the car it only takes me about half hour to get one stripped to individual parts, as Al says you have to get a bit heavy with it sometimes though! Its all due to corrosion from salt etc as you say Peter.

[Bassman 1]

Well, all sorted now.

 

Bought myself a decent set of Bosch Titanium coated HSS bits (6 for 16.49 versus 13 for 10.49 before) and they went straight through the snapped stud "like butter" and then I rotated it out with an easy-out. So don't bother with cheap MacAllister drill bits, they are crap for steel.

 

With regards to the beam, both trailing arms are out now, although one end of each torsion bar is still stuck, but I guess they can stay like that now as I won't need to remove them completely.

 

One arm looks brand new, with nearly all the black surface finish intact and the bearing surfaces are very smooth. The other arm looks older, but again the bearing surfaces are smooth and I can't feel anything running a nail over the surface.

 

Both the outer bearing races are present and the arms were smothered in fairly fresh looking grease, so I get the feeling it has been apart at some time, but as the car had been standing for some time, that perhaps the rust was excessive for that reason. I will have a better look at the weekend, but it looks like it was 40 quid well spent.

 

Need to get my shopping list together now, thanks for the support to get me this far!

 

Thanks

 

Rob

[welshpug 1,655]

should be pretty easy to get the torsion bars out now that you have separated them from the tube

[andychalmers 0]

I bought a Tom Fenton tool, snapped the little bolt twice, I just stick with a big lump hammer, then a slide hammer one unseized, easy.