This one really should start with an “OH FUCK!”
Really, it needs to….
It’s not everyday you are poking around at the back of your daily commuter car, standard “are the brake pads thick enough”, “are the tyres looking like Telly Savalas yet ?” and you spot something that really makes you go “OH FUCK!”
Well – this is one of them – my transverse link arm has a fucking crack!
One of the places I used to work, I’d heard horror stories about a colleagues’ wife’s Audi TT that had a rear suspension failure, due to the suspension rose bush seizing, then failing completely, and causing the wishbone to crack and break completely, leaving the car pissed off to one angle on the ground, and definitely “I ain’t gonna get this home tonight”.
I’d checked my ’52 plate A3 against the known list of recalls (Audi/VAG did a recall for these, what were ultimately faulty suspension rose bushes) and nothing was reported for these rose bush failures, so, I thought that I was all ok, and safe from said issue – but no, appears not.
I cannot stress just how critical the transverse arms are on a car’s suspension – it really would be an “oh shit!” moment if one lets go when you’re 70mph in the outside lane – probably gonna need at least a new set of underwear.
After finding my cracked transverse link, other than the initial “I’m taking the Beast o work tomorrow” – I figured I would have to look at what needed to happen.
An evening or two’s investigation with the Interweb at my fingertips, I’d located a guide on what to do, and more importantly, the names, and part numbers for the bits I needed to replace.
With that list nicely made out, a quick call to my parts place, TPS in Kidlington, and once they had the parts in stock, I could think about progressing this work.
I was however missing one very key item from my tool kit – a bush press.
It **IS** possible to do this work without a bush press – but – I am going to need to bush press other bushes out on other areas on this car, and maybe the RS4 if, and when they need replacing in the future (and potentially my gorgeous Cath’s A3 clone as well – her Golf 🙂 ) – this kit would be of future use to me, so, a quick trawl through that ubiquitous marketplace known as eBay, I’d found a toolset that would do the job – and that was purchased.
A note here, the cost of the toolkit, and the cost of the parts (TPS is not quite trade price to the public) – I would still be massively quids in doing this work myself.
This work should be a – jack up, support via axle stands, use the jack to support the trailing arm, disconnect the transverse arms from the trailing arm, press the old bushes out, and then press new bushes back in, and then bolt everything back together again.
Right: Although it is possible to disconnect and do a lot of this work with the brake caliper attached, you can see that it’s a bit “tight” in there – it is a lot easier, especially when you come to doing the bush pressing itself to take the caliper off.
What is noticeable in the shot above right, is that the transverse arm is no where near centred on the hub carrier – it’s way off to the left – and that is part of the problem – the bush that is supposed to keep it centred it has failed.
Once this bolt was taken out, I did decide to take the caliper off, and to prevent it hanging on the flexible (and damagable) brake line, used a bungy cord to hold it a little out of the way, but prevent any undue stress in the brake line.
From here, everything is rather simple – thread the high tensile threaded bar through the centre of the rose bush – pick the biggest one in your kit that fits through the bolt hole –
remember we are about to put a lot of pressure on that threaded bar – and whilst it is high tensile steel – the thicker, and deeper the threads are the better.
Right: Trailing arm supported by jack (car is on axle stands for safety) – with threaded bar through bush, and the two caps, and nuts tightened enough to start putting pressure on the bush.
Right: You know when things are working when the smaller cap starts to push the bush out of the mount, and into the bigger cap – you can see the bush clearly emerging from it’s home into the open clutches of the larger open cup as you tighten the nuts on the bar.
It should be noted, that it does take a fair bit of muscle to start this off, but once they are moving, it is relatively easy in comparison to the initial move – but you still need a bit of muscle in your arms 🙂
Keep on tightening, and then all of a sudden, with a quick pop – the bush will come free, and everything that was under tension suddenly won’t be.
Et viola!
Right: One hub carrier minus it’s rose bush – clear through to the other side.
Once I’d got here, although it was really just the first stage, I was really feeling a buzz of excitement getting this work done.
Small steps – big buzz 🙂
Putting the bush in – pretty much exactly the same – use the smaller cup to push it it, and start winding on those nuts on the bar.
Right: In this shot, you can see that the smaller cup on the right has some marks, this is where it passed through the hole as it was pushing out the old bush – there was some junk on the outside of the hole that caused a minor rub – nothing damaged or to worry about.
If I was to do it again, I **might** consider using the next size down to mitigate against that minor issue – if it had been a tiny bit bigger, it might have damaged the lining where the rose bush sits, and that would be bad.
I found that there are a couple of tricks to putting them back in.
The first – take the time aligning things up, and then go slowly to start it off to make sure the new bush is going in square, and definitely not “on the piss”.
The second, is crucial to make sure you don’t over wind, and push the bush to far – and that is keep looking – keep watching, all the time, through the split in the big cup – that is what that split is there for – viewing (amongst other reasons).
Push it too far, so that it isn’t central is a pain – you have to dismantle your bush removal tools, and re-assemble them the other way round to push it back into position – and is just a pain in the arse.
Right: New bush nicely sitting in it’s new home, ready to have the bottom transverse link re-attached. Note the clear gap between where the bar U is – and where the bush is.
Trust me when I say there is bit of brute force an ignorance required here – I had to man-handle the hub carrier on the jack to get enough “wiggle” room to get everything lined up.
Right: So far, so good, we’ve got the bush replaced, and are almost aligned and ready to put the new bolt in – there is still a bit of a wiggle to go.
Once this was done, I took out the top bush, but didn’t replace it – because for me, the next step is to replace the transverse link arm – read this in part 2.
