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As some of you might know, I offered to refurbish kezzers rear beam & lower it to match his front springs, which I also fitted, a while ago & we finally got it all done last week. This topic also goes to show exactly how little you can tell about the state of a beam without taking it apart. Adams beam showed no signs of camber & moved freely with no adverse warning squeaks but, adam had mentioned it rubbed when he had a passenger in the rear seat. When I swapped the front springs I had a quick look & was initially puzzled because the inner wings shwed no signs of the tyre rubbing on them whcih you associate with a dying beam. We started it on thursday morning last week & need it to all come apart nice & quick because the firm where I go to use the press for removing & refitting the trailing arm shafts would be closed on Friday with it being easter weekend. Luckily, even though we hadn't done much preparation with any wd40 or penetrating oil, it came apart ok & after our 11am start I was on the way to swap the trailing arm shafts by 3pm. On first look at the beam, it looked quite promising as the beam showed signs of having been apart before, having newer seals & cups fitted than expected. I tried removing the torsion bars initially on the car but with limited access in the narrow single car garage at Adam's house ended up removing the beam built up to strip it completely. I first removed the driver side rear shocks before we took the beam off the car & with it off I noticed the trailing arm shaft wasn't seated correctly but it turned out that was due to the lower shock mounting bolt being seized in the trailing arm & when I'd tried to remove it, the whole thing had moved, pulling the tube end of the torsion bar with it slightly. With this inital sign of things moving freely I proceeded to use Tom Fentons puller to hopefully remove the torsion bar completely but unfortunately it was firmly stuck in the trailing arm end & all I managed to do was kill my pipe wrench causing it to slip on the nut so I gave up & left it attached to remove it seperately. This was the first signs of what we were to find which made it lucky Adam had chosen to source all the parts he might have needed prior to starting the rebuild. Once the beam was off & with the trailing arm fully removed, you can see the seals had started to let water in & the bearing grease had already turned into a rusty mess. After a wipe down; With the shock removed, the passenger side came apart much easier once the stud lock nut, screw & offset washer were also removed but also showed what a state it was in If anything, the rusty mess we found on the drivers side was actually better, the bearing was already well past its best & had we left it much longer, the central tube was next part that would have turned to scrap, luckily we couldn't have caught it much better. As you can see in the picture below, the outer bearing on the passenger side has started to break up & several rollers were already gone, the beam had been subject to new bearings previously but these were of the type with fewer rollers, shown better on the drivers side which were just still intact. Passenger side trailing arm shaft; Once everything was apart I loaded everything into my car including the replacement tube Adam had sourced from Stuart & headed off to swap the old, dead radius arm shafts for the shiny new ones Adam got from Poland. I had intended to get the beam rebuilt Thursday evening but shortly after getting home & unloading the car, a mate called round & we ended up going for a few pints.