Rear tracking issues

[Nick Jones]

Today was the day.......

First undo the outer ends to see how big a fight they were going to put up. In fact not that bad apart from trouble holding the centre still with silly little 8mm hex. Patience, a wire brush and plenty of plus gas working in the end and apart from the exposed ends of the thread (which were the cause of the trouble) the assembly was rust free inside.

The inner end on the LHS was less pretty. I already knew this was really stuck and as mentioned by others, grinder access is a bit limited......
so I used this

Yep, a hacksaw blade taped to a stick...... You can laugh, but it did the job in under 10 minutes. The other end (rear) I managed to get the grinder in so that took about 10 seconds!


Then it was time to investigate why Audi say the early and late arms are not interchangeable........
..... and I have no idea why they say this. As far as I can see they are a direct swap - just add an M12 x 120mm bolt, nyloc nut and a couple of washers. The outer bush on the new link that replace the older balljoint style has a profiled end on the inner tube that fits perfectly into the conical recess in the link arm




(That's a 130mm bolt in the pic - I trimmed it back to about 115mm)

It all bolts straight up (apart from some messing with levers and bit of rope to drag everything back into line. Everything dosed with plenty of copper slip.



All back together. RHS was easier as the inner bolt suddenly decided to come free (I wasn't as violent with this side during the exploratory ops) which spared me the hacksaw games.

Interestingly enough, both the original outer balljoints were absolutely fine. Arms would be re-usable if the inner bushes were available.

Now I can get the alignment done properly

Nick