1st one was fitting the Tonneau cover I bought as a kit from AK last year. Most folks get AK to fit these at the factory, but talking it through with Jon he convinced me it was a straightforward customer fit.
The kit contains the cover itself plus the body pins and fasteners.
The cover does not come with the fasteners fitted so these have to be fitted as part of the job.
The body pins supplied are not the self tapper type as Jon reckons these can cause the paint to crack, thus the ones supplied require drill through body and fixing with a nut.
I started by working out where to fit the rearmost, central pin then working from there. Once this was in place, I fitted the appropriate fastener to the cover and attached to the body pin. From there I worked out the front pin positions (replacing the demister screws), fitted the cover fasteners so the cover was fitted front/back on the centreline. The trick is to maintain tension in the cover while positioning the remaining pins and the result is a taught canvas when fully fitted.
Next job - Sump Guard
I bought this off Charlie Freeman over a year ago and finally got round to fitting it.
Easy job to do with my lift.
And finally, I decided to check my tracking.
Since I refitted the diff which had required complete dismantle of rear suspension - I was getting a fair bit of tyre squeal at lowish cornering speeds.
In the absence of any technical equipment I used the good old string and tape measure method.
First off was to check the rear wheel alignment. According to the forums, the rear wheels should be either parallel or up to 1mm toe-in. ( i.e. difference between track at front and rear of the wheel rim between each side.)
I made a perfectly square frame using some aluminium I section I had around and used this to create a box around the back of the car , just enough to wrap around the rear wheels. Using a measure and a bit of maths, its then easy to calculate if the wheel rims are parallel. It turned out mine were miles out, toe in was a lot more than 1mm.
As it happens, my rear lower A- Arms are the type that have slotted fulcrum holes at the outer end. These allow you to adjust the camber and toe-in. The A-Arm has a shoulder each side of the slotted hole that allows an eccentric headed bolt to be used to adjust the movement in-out. I didn't have one of these bolts so made an eccentric washer that does the same job. Using this I managed to set the rear wheels as near as dammit parallel, maybe just a touch of toe-in.
On to the front, I set up string lines between axle stands on each side of the car, taking a measure from the rear wheel rims. As the rears were now parallel, its reasonable to assume that the strings are parallel over their full length. I then took measurements from the strings to the front and rear of each front wheel rim and calculated that I had about 12mm to-in. The AK manual states 4mm so clearly some adjustment required. I made the adjustments equally on both track rod ends to make sure the steering wheel stayed central and managed to get to 4mm toe-in.
Road test - and what a difference! No tyre squeal and a lot more confidence around corners. Just goes to show how important having decent alignment is.
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