Father & Son Build - A/C Hard Lines & Trailing Arm Camber Fix

Now that most of the tear down on Nathan's 1972 Baja Bug is complete, the father-son team begins to prep the chassis for air conditioning by running the pressure lines through the tunnel. Now, we aren't AC experts, and we've never done this before so we'll see how it comes out! Then Sam and Nate tackle something that has bothered the duo since they were first bolted on... the positive camber on the aftermarket 3x3 trailing arms. So after accessing the situation, they decide to cut off the inner pivot, square the axles up to the chassis and re-weld the pivots in so that the rear tires sit in a much more appropriate position. This first seemed like a fairly daunting task but it ended up being pretty easy, all things considered!

Video Transcript

Hi guys, I'm Sam, and I'm Nate, and we're going to make some sparks, mainly because I need to repair all the horrible, horrible patchwork. I don't know why they cut those two holes there and that one hole there. I've got this thing marked out so I can cut a hole there for the clutch cable access and for an AC line access. I do have some material here to make a cover for that and a cover for this, so we're going to get started on doing all that stuff.

I can't wait to get literally everything taken apart so then we can clean everything out. I mean, well, you could start by working on taking apart the axles, I won't stop you.

Anyway, so this piece right here, I need to knock him off because our AC lines are going to come out right here, so I'm going to cut this out and cut this over. Wow, it's a good thing that's not structural because literally that thing pops out with no effort whatsoever. Basically, we're still working on the chassis when weather allows. And actually, right now, it's almost fall, which in Phoenix usually means nothing because it's still 100° outside, but right now it's actually only 92°. So we're going to take advantage of some cooler weather and do some more work. Nathan's already got the axles out. As you can see, I've actually kind of already got some lines mocked up for our air conditioning, so it's going to be very nice out here when it's 100°. Having air conditioning will be nice, so we're going to get to work.

Uh, 15 17, 15 15, I think, on those two nose cone bolts. Isn't even a person. One more weld on there, and we get to break loose right there, old-fashioned style. There we go, this thing came off with virtually no effort, just a couple of tack welds when I relocated our two tubes here for our bus transmission. I cut that open and welded them in place there to hold them, but we'll do some patchwork on that. Now, with this out of the way, we can run our air conditioning lines all the way through and up here. This one is going to come across the top of this brace. This is going to sit up here, and then this line will come into the bottom of that, attached to that. This guy will fit under that, and then this line will run in the tunnel, and that guy will hook up to that line inside the tunnel. Then we'll hook up this up there with my new line when it comes in. And then at the back of the car, these lines—obviously, the transmission's right here in the center—so I need to move these lines over to the side. So I'm going to end up cutting this, so we'll give us the room for these lines to come out on the sides over here.

So now we've got tons of room off to the side of here for our air conditioning lines to run down the right side, and then up and out past clear of our transmission. I am going to try and box this in somehow to make it a bit stronger. Yeah, plus we still have to come in and box in the rest of this nose cone mount. Still need to corroseal inside of our tunnel, throw it back up in place real quick. There, more in there. We can't do the bend in that until we get that front piece in. For now, I guess we can get these holes pre-drilled. Yeah, yay, the start of AC in my car!
Yep, buddy!

Alright, where’s your goggles? See how you have to go way bigger, drop that guy in, and you see. Now, where’s the cool? There. So, we’ve got our bulkhead in place on the tunnel, just loosely installed. This is our inlet, or our AC’s pressure side, high-pressure side line. Got him hooked up there, got a little 90 there. We can install him in the bottom side of that.

Looks good, huh? Heck yeah!

And then that’s up over the top of that. We’ll probably end up maybe doing some sort of clamp or bracket inside the tunnel to hold this line over that way, as well as I might do some more hand bending on that line just to hold this off to the side of the tunnel. And then down here, I’m going to do some more hand bending. This line is relatively easy to bend by hand, so we can just bend it by hand.

Yep, but the bigger one, I’m sure, is a bit harder. Yeah, we can just do a bend on that, that way or that way, depending on which way our condenser and everything else sits. But for now, that’s good right there. Then this line all the way up there, and then this line here will connect underneath there, because this line right here will go under there, and then this line I’ll bend up to connect to there. And that will give us our suction side of our air conditioning all inside the tunnel. And because the clutch cable is on that side of the tunnel right there, everything’s going to be nice and clear of our suction side. You can see our high-pressure side here, our suction side is right here, and these are going to both be clear of our clutch pedal, so no issue there. Accelerator cable tube is right there, and then right there is our fuel line, which was clogged and is now cleaned out. However, that is going to be the return line for fuel injection, because we have some bigger stuff, 5/16 fuel line up here. And this is the bender I got, a 90° multi-bender kit, and it bends really nice and even when it’s... I already messed with this a whole bunch, and this was my practice piece. I got another one coming.

Although I guess at this point, because I don’t like how much camber is on those wheels at the current position, we could negative camber—this is positive camber—that’s just the way these trailing arms sit. So, I want to start pulling these trailing arms apart, I guess, and pull out the spring plates, see if we can’t cycle these trailing arms a little bit. Flip them over, perhaps. We’ll get them sitting flat as possible. Yeah, because it doesn’t look that good when it’s like that, instead of straight up and down. So, I guess we can start pulling apart everything on the rear end, I guess, Nathan, um, take out the—well, we’ve got to pull off the tires, and then we’ve got to pull off the spring plate covers and the spring plate bolts and the pivots and the brakes and all that stuff. And actually, I’ve got to pull off the... I have to cut off the brake tabs because we’re going to relocate those calipers, see if we can’t get the parking brake to work. I still need to weld that up. I’ve got welding to do, I’ve got to box that in. It’s a whole lot of little stuff.
Yeah, it’s all that little stuff that makes the difference. And like, you know, having air conditioning. Yeah, air conditioning would be nice. So, let’s get to it.

Yeah, that is enough travel. Oh my gosh, see articulation change there is down? Yeah, we’re going to have to cut those. May those—what these are? Yep, watch what happens on this. Yeah, it’s like that way and it’s that—it’s toe in, it’s a positive camber, and then that is like perfect. That is on point, so whatever that is, we just need to do that. Well, the thing is, up top, when it goes up, it should be a bit of negative, correct? This is the opposite. Well, I mean not the opposite, just—it’s flat there when it should be more angled. Yeah, like I don’t think there’s going to be a baja bug that low.

So, option one is back-cut that, reweld it. Option two is cut these out, put the aftermarket pivots in, and that’s about our only options. But yeah, I don’t see—rather cut thing, it sounds better than cutting the thing that holds the suspension and it’s German metal too.

Well, well, at least it’s out now. That’s out, that was actually surprisingly easy, that’s good. So, it wasn’t the hardest part because I’d rather cut up some random Chinese junk in my car.
Yeah.

Yay, just like that. All right, um, from there, um, we pull the spring plates out. Let's clean up some of this mess. All right, we're back at it again after we got everything cleaned up, all the trailing arms ground down from where we cut those out. We got all of our pivots cleaned up. Now we're going to go ahead and get these things set in and try to get them sitting level, and then we'll set a little bit of toe in, or at least once they're level, then we can go ahead and set our spring plates. So just tighten up to where you can still sit tight, just snug as it can be. Well, when you actually, like, go to completely put it together, then you put it all tight when it's on its own weight, then yes.

So now we can hang our trailing arms again, and we're only going to use two holes that are slotted because this hole right here isn't really that good. It doesn't allow us to adjust our toe in and out, and switch over the 19 and get these guys tightened. It, I mean, you basically got it all the way tight by hand. Yeah, hit it. All right, hopefully by clearancing the top end of that, that will be able to sit flatter, and it already looks better. Yeah, we got to hang this side, buddy.

Is this the perfect bar? No, but it's pretty darn close. This bar just happens to fit almost perfectly through there. Boom, installed axle. Let's get our inner bearing spacers. Tell you or tell us how actually pretty precise this bar is. I can't get this bearing spacer in on this side. I can't get the bar. Jack this arm a little bit first. Actually, that might have done all I need. Yep, I got it. Okay, perfect. There we go, that bearing's out on this side. Now where's the big dog? 19, that one, yep, those just a bit. Yep, bottom there it goes. Just think about all the specialty tools that they must have used back in the factory. Huh, all right, now we got to be able to push these arms forward on these slots there, and then we know how far we need to come forward for our alignment.

All right, pull those both off that side. Oh yeah, actually grab that piece, inch and a half. I mean, yeah, all right, that'll give us some more support on that. Looks almost like a go-kart axle now. Let's try this again, pick it up and try clamping it. All right, grab that, see, it's right here. Yeah, that's as tight as I think I can go, so we just need to find ride height. Basically, we need to make sure that the axle is straight front to rear.

Once we get this point welded here and this point welded here, then we know our axles are flat. Then we can come in and start worrying about our toe in and toe out. It'd be negative camber when it's fully compressed. If that is zero, it's .34, not horrible. .17, .17. Well, I'd say that's pretty darn good. Hey, hey, straight, I talk about straight in between the bubbles, bud. It's right in between the lines. It's perfect.

Also, we need to worry about our front to back measurement as well, but like, so it doesn't grab. It's pretty darn straight right there, but it's our front to back measurement that we really need to consider. Grab two more C clamps from underneath the bench. I just want to get that spring plate more in line with the torsion housing. As long as this... yeah, well, I just make sure that as we're setting this, if we're setting this straight up and down, it's not because the car is crooked. All right, you are zero, 1.3. Drive the other aluminum jack. Uh, the inside needs to come up, so that is essentially ride height right there, dropped out more or less, so the spring plates did not move during any of that. Okay, I think we're just going to try and run with it right here. This is going to have to be close enough to square with a straight tube going through.

This one could go up just a touch to be in line with those. We've got a couple of solid points in. From there, just line it up. Oh, it needs to come back. I know, watch this right here. See how, oh yeah, light goes down a bit more. Yeah, we're .34% off of level, so if I can get that side level and this side .52, that thing is just about level. Does it need to? If I have to drop this down, what happens? 1.4 or 1.87. 69, nice. .52, .34, zero right there. Zero. All right, 0° on our axle, zero on the torsion housing. So I guess that is all. Well, that torsion housing is flat to this axle, seeing as all the suspension is built off of that. There we go, that's at zero, and that's at zero. Yeah, so our axle and our torsion housing are both level. Awesome.

Let's go tack it in before it falls again. No, right now we need to make certain that front to rear measurements are the same. I want to come forward to a point that is straight right across the front of this car. If these were sticking out the same, I guess we could run a measurement off of those. Let's see, where are we at? Five and a quarter. All right, stop looking at four and three-quarters. All right, let's see, four and seven-eighths side, four seventy-eight. Okay, watch out 'cause that side's a little bit sharp. 103 and a quarter. 103 and a quarter, okay, it's straight. Roll it in now. I think we're pretty darn good. I'm going to go to the beam in between, see if I can find a spot. Beam between, uh, 106 and a quarter to the front edge of the trailing arm. 106 six and a quarter to the front edge of the trailing arm. All right, it's good enough. Yeah, I think if not perfect, I think it's pretty dang close, if not perfect. Yeah, okay, that is solid there, that is solid there.

Tack it in before it gets messed up again. Yep.

All right, you guys cool off to do all this stuff again? Is that's all? Yeah, well then, once we actually get the spring plates, drill it up.

That's still really, really hot. It looks at least um negative camber. For me, I would have just been like, oh, let's go eat dinner and then come back, but want to give me some washer, the bolt over there? So far it looks way better. Now if anything, it's negative camber. It doesn't look like it would be positive camber on this side. I know, now the question is whether or not we got toe-ins or toe-outs. Got straight across the top of the trailing arms right there, we got 58 and a half. What we have, a three, 58 and 3/4 in toe, so they actually have some room for sliding back and forth, so that's good.

Yeah, boom. Today, way better than the try-to, way better. We can just pull the spring plates off, bolt them over to the other side, and then drill that front side to use as a template to drill the front, but first things first, let's clean up some of these tools. Yeah, and let it cool. You guys want to watch this? So yeah, recording. No, it hasn't. Why hasn't it been recording? 'Cause it's been unplugged. Don't know how long that's been unplugged. Hopefully that one's been recording. You guys recording? All right, it's red flashing, yeah, so that's good.

Okay, we're cleaned up a little bit more now. Are you recording? Time. I'm tired. Rain. Yeah, we're almost there. We'll try and get these things drilled out, and then we'll call it a night. Uh, 15 or 19.

That's so much better, yeah. It goes just slightly negative camber when it's up, and when it's down there's a slightly positive camber. Slight, not massive, not like that, basically.

All right, got the 219s bolts right there. Oh yeah, want me to go get that? Yep, all right, hopefully centered enough. All right, you want to grab that clean plate, bolt it on that side.

All righty, from here I guess we don't need to mock up the spring plates, but we can mock up the brake calipers. Seven o'clock almost, let's bolt these on and then call it a night. Maybe we can throw the stub axles in, the brake drums on too if we want. All right, drop it down. Look at that, it's not like that. Yeah, it looks a bit straighter now. Amazing, and it feels a bit easier to roll too, almost. Oh, perfect timing, mom's got home. That is more likely. Technically it is a little bit lower than... yeah, I don't want a squatted bug. I can deal with that, and with that our camber and our toe-in should be good to go. Yeah, um, we're never going to know until we actually get it up onto an alignment rack, and they can play with it. It should get us in the ballpark, but now we're ready to reweld the calipers on, uh, hopefully in a position where I can actually route the parking brake cable. That will be nice, yeah, so I can have a parking brake. Parking brake would be very handy. Once we get that in place, once we get the caliper brackets welded on with the parking brake hopefully in place, then we can pull everything off again. I've got the AC line coming in tomorrow. However, we're going to be helping out Kyle on his newest class 11 car that took some damage at Crandon and nitro cross in Virginia, so we're going to do some body work on that tomorrow, possibly.

So with that, the back end for tonight is done. That was a big, big ordeal getting these pivots cut out and rewelded in a much more neutral position at ride height. That was a big concern of mine, but that's taken care of now, so we can get on to other things. With that, I'm Sam, I'm Nate, and life's full of good people. If you can't find one, be one. Later guys.