1980 Chevy Camaro Berlinetta
Page Three
Front Bushings and Ball Joints
The car had the original bushings and ball joints and after 33 years they certainly have outlived their usefulness. There's also 33 years of grease, grime and road schmutz caked on its almost like cement. So I ordered a front end bushing kit from PST - Performance Suspension Technology
Once again a tool from my Grandfathers collection came in handy. this offset 1/2 inch wrench was perfect for removing the front shocks.
Things went along pretty smooth until it was time to remove the upper drivers side control arm.
It seems that the steering shaft is just a bit too close to be able to remove the upper arm. So to fix this, I removed the bolts from the steering box. This enabled me to be push the box to the side along with the shaft just enough to get the control arm out.
On the passenger side the problem there was the lower ball joint bolt would spin along with the nut, and having no way of keeping the bolt still I broke out the grinder with a cutting wheel. You can see what the nut looked like after the operation.
I had the bushings and ball joints pressed in at a local garage. Sometimes it is better to have things done by those who have done it before. The rest of the re-assembly went pretty un-eventful although very time consuming.
The next project was to replace the Rochester Quadrajet carb with a new shiney Edelbrock.
This caused a few issues first with the new throttle bracket the kickdown cable to be way off.
Getting a new, more adjustable throttle bracket fixed that problem, the next problem was the air cleaner was too tall because of the adapter to convert the spread bore intake to the square bore carb. Using a 2 inch tall air cleaner solved that. I also pulled the valve covers, cleaned and painted them.