In December 2009 we started preparing to drive the Corvette back home. We had been fixing the car at my friends working place and they had started asking how long the car was going to stay there. So it was time to leave...
But we still had a long list of things to do so we worked hard for a couple of weeks. First my friend removed the passenger side trailing arm and changed the bushings. It went much faster this time as we now knew how to do it. Again we also cleaned and painted the parts before installing them back to the car. I have to say that the workmanship in the trailing arm was horrible. The welding looked like crap and someone had made a hole in the metal while welding the parking brake cable bracket. It was "fixed" by filling the hole with a bunch of welding rod pieces. B-E-A-Utiful... One worrying thing also was that you could pull the spindle out by hand. The other side needed a press. This had to be checked when changing the bearings.
At the same time I changed the seals in the driver side headlight actuator. I found pretty good instructions for the job. One of seals had broken so I hoped this would fix the slowly opening lights. I also noticed that one of the springs that helped the actuator to open the door was missing. I had to place an order for it because the lights still opened too slowly when we tested them later.
We were progressing faster than expected so we also changed the rear leaf spring. We had noticed earlier that the old one had broken leaves and needed replacing. Luckily I found an used one that was in good condition and only needed some cleaning.
And while the rear suspension was in pieces anyway, we also replaces some U joints from the axles. The old needle bearings had turned to dust. Now the rear wheels were not making strange noises when driving any more. Oh, and naturally we cleaned and painted the axles as they were off the car.
Finally we changed the differential oil. The old oil didn't seem to be in too bad condition so possibly someone had actually changed it during the last decade...
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