help! - a-arm bolt trouble

[treed2@u.washington.edu (Toby Reed)]

Alright folks,

I should have known better.. I've had this exact same problem before when 
installing my poly a-arm bushings! (except on the other side of the car)

Basically, I took the front control arm bolts out to bolt on a lower 
stress bar (some p.o. pulled the stock one off for some reason and never 
put it back on). I enlarged the holes in the new stress bar by about 2mm 
so the bolts will fit through it (my frame is stretched a little, 
apparently), and I carefully threaded the bolts half-way in, through the 
bar. The problem is... while the passenger side on went right in (I had 
trouble with this side earlier), the driver side bolt refuses to go the 
last little bit in to the back side of the "cup" that holds the a-arm (the 
part that has the threads in it).

I've spent about 3 hours trying to coax it in using various techniques..
shining a flashlight through the hole to see which way the arm needs to be 
moved and using clamps and a scizzor-jack to try and raise and "move in" 
the bushing relative to the frame "cup".. that "worked" according to my 
flashlight eyeballing but for some reason the bolt still refuses to thread 
in. It "sort-of" threads in... it feels like its going in, but then it 
just spins around without ever really entering the threaded part. If I 
back it out one rotation after cranking on it 20 times it just pops right 
out - so it has sort of cut its own "thread" in between the two misaligned 
holes (or something).

As far as brute force goes... I tapped it gently with a hammer (i later 
read this is a bad idea because it can actually break the nut welded on to 
the frame), I tried an electric impact wrench.. neither helped...

Last time I had the wheel off and the car jacked up so I was able to 
maneuver the a-arm around a bit in the "cup" and after about 10 hours 
finally got the bolt threaded in. I don't remember exactly what I did to 
get it lined up, though. I wish I'd written it down.

I'm pretty much out of ideas. The thing is - the install instructions for 
the bar said to raise the car on ramps, so I did. Now the ramps are in the 
way of my front jack points so I can't really jack the car up, and I can't 
move it with the control arm bolt out - so I'm pretty much stuck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

-Toby

--
'87 16v

--
Email LIST problems to: scirocco-l-probs@scirocco.org.
To unsubscibe send "unsubscribe scirocco-l" in the message to majordomo@scirocco.org