Update by Per Schroeder to the
Alfa Romeo 2000 GTV project car
Mar 18, 2007
We used a floor jack and a heavy duty tow strap to remove the front spring. The jack pushes up on the control arm while the strap keeps the car from rising, thus compressing the spring so that the spring pan can be unbolted.
We used a floor jack and a heavy duty tow strap to remove the front spring. The jack pushes up on the control arm while the strap keeps the car from rising, thus compressing the spring so that the spring pan can be unbolted.
We’re using a RubberMaid container and five gallons of degreaser to create our own hot tank.
After a few days in our vat of degreaser, the parts are clean enough to paint.
POR-15 coated suspension parts
Refitting the front arms
Mostly back together
Our Konis, ready to go on the GTV.
Just needs brakes...
We just realized this morning that we’ve owned our Alfa GTV for a year now. Wow, we’ve come a long way in that time!
For a one-year anniversary present, we started rebuilding the GTV’s front suspension. We started by carefully unbolting things.
Next, we put a bunch of suspension pieces in a make-shift hot tank for degreasing. A few days in undiluted “Purple Power” degreaser will clean just about anything. It strips paint after a while too. And dissolves aluminum. Yikes.
We pulled the parts out of the bucket of degreaser and with minimal scrubbing, they’re clean enough to paint. We’ll be using POR-15 to paint the control arms.
We coated our suspension arms and other bits with POR15 paint. The paint is quite tough and acts as a “poor man’s powder coating” with good abrasion and chip resistance, as well as rust stoppage.
We pressed polyurethane bushings into the new adjustable upper control arms. The arms are adjustable for more negative camber.
The front suspension is now ready for new springs and Koni shocks.
We adjusted the front Koni’s to 2/3rd stiff before we installed them. We like the front of our racers to be well damped, helping transitional response.
The front suspension is now capable of supporting the weight of the car, but we’re waiting for some new brake pads from Porterfield before we button everything up.
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