I'm in the middle of replacing my front drums with ventilated discs. I have assembled the new brakes but I can't get the struts to compress enough to go back in! What am I doing wrong?
Thanks Matty

bolt them up at the top and then put the jack under the disk and jack it up till it lines up with the holes. piece of piss.

just curious, what are the disks of?

My 180B struts used to be difficult to put onto the stanza lower arms in my 1200. Until I shortened the strut tube to suit shorter 260Z inserts.. Now they go in NICELY. no more steel bar, swearing and excessive beer consumption to get them back in.

The morale of the story is to "Measure your original struts, then measure the assembled new struts, and try and keep them similar lengths".

Chris

The discs and calipers are off an S13 Silvia. They are bolted to a of set 120Y struts with a 10mm metal bracket using the original high tensile bolts. A guy by the name of Kev Rowley built them for me here in Brisbane. It's a superb job. They look like they were built this way from the factory. Can't wait to get them in and try them out!!!
Matty

auto places also sell spring compressors for upto $50 though, these are used to clamp on your springs and screw em down to a small enough size that you can put strut in easily, but hey if you can get the previous method to work then youv'ed saved some money i guess

dattodude, how did you have strut shortened or did ya do it yourself, i was thinking of doing this instead of adjustable tops, my front is too high and am getting positive camber (on RC)

was also going to redrill cross-member so i didnt have to lower it to get negative camber,

other option would be to buy shorter springs i guess, but dont wont to loose travel

[edit] that probably didnt make 100% sense
the car currently sits higher than standard with positive camber, i want to lower it back to standard then it should be 0 camber, so i want to get negative camber without lowering futher

Side bar: I jacked up my sedans front to change the tires......on setting her down, something's wrong. There is TONS of positive camber???! Could my strut cartridges have stuck? What is going on? Note: this car does not run/move so I have no way to make the suspension "settle back in". Thanks for any ideas.

no, maybe the ball joints are worn ... letting the bottom of the strut flop about a bit?

Struts stuck ... yeah that might do it, but seems unlikely. You should be able to see if the strut cylinders are rusty.

Yeah, I did it myself. You could go to the effort of talking to engineers and paying them a motza, but it looks standard if you are a good at mig welding.

Using the Zed strut inserts, (I think they were 240Z), you first need to cut enough out of the tube (below the cup). Make the first cut just below the cup, so that when you weld it back together you can merge your new weld with the existing weld. A section needs to be neatly cut (perfectly square). I used a lathe to machine the top bit (including the bottom spring cup) perfectly square, and neatly cut the remaining struts tube with a piece of tape to mark the cut line and carefully hacksawed the section out.. Now you may ask "how much needs to be cut out?", well I'd say about 50mm, but you will need to measure the difference in the insert length between the original one and the Zed one. Measure twice and cut once.

It's possible that you might run into a problem in that, depending on the strut, your spring will not be the correct length for the 240Z insert. You may need to use 240Z/260Z springs, or move the cup to suit the 1200 springs.

So these are the three things you need to think about :
1. Cutting the strut down so the 240Z insert fits in the non-Zed strut without a spacer underneath.
2. Making sure that the spring to shocker insert "travel" is matched. A spring is matched to the insert length, so using the longer 1200 springs with the shorter 240Z inserts could cause the springs to over-compress and bottom-out.
3. When shortening the struts, try and overlap your weld with the factory one, so it will pass an inspection unnoticed. Use an old insert to hold the strut together while welding. Don't overheat the insert while welding, it might explode. Make sure that the inside of the struts are clean from oil before welding.

I hope this helps
Chris