Boring Black Rallye

[wainwrightj]

Hello there finally got round to making the full update.

After having enough of putting up with a shagged beam I started having a look around on eBay for a replacement. After a little searching found a decent Xsara VTS beam with 21mm torsion bars for £100 posted if I can remember correctly around 80k miles which is 40k less than my shagged beam had done so jumped at it.

Before


After


After stripping all of what I could off of it my girlfriend and I gave it a coat of Kurust.



Followed by a coat of Black Hammerite and a splash of pink on the ARB plates that matches the front slam panel, airbox and abs bracket.



Ordered some new bits to throw on at the same time as the new beam, Baker BM solid rear mounts Hel Performance braided brake lines. Also bought new ABS sensors as they wouldn’t come off the beam, some new brake disk covers and finally a pair of handbrake cables. Don’t worry sent the horrible green brake lines back for some carbon fibre look ones that don’t look as obnoxious.



Chucked the mounts on the beam along with the shocks, turns out the shock on the shagged side of the old beam had started to collapse which may have explained why that side went and not the other that or the beam caused the shock to collapse and that’s what was causing the knock. Either way put the shock that came on the beam back on. Looking to get eibach at some point if I can lower the beam couldn’t get the torsions bars off so I’m not sure how that’ll go. Either way the pics!





Got the old beam off after this and as I did the bump stop on the shagged side fell out with it. Got the calipers off to ready for some paint.



With the old beam off I made new brake lines using the old ones as a template and ended up with a finished product.



Bathed the calipers and the brackets from the Xsara beam in a citric acid bath and attacked them with the wire wheel on a drill and a chisel. At this point I hadn’t bought the new disk covers and was planning on saving the old ones safe to safe it wasn’t worth the effort.



Decided on yellow for the calipers.


Before


During


After


Had a look at where the bump stop was supposed to be and of course it was held together with rust and luck dad was able to bring his works van home and he went about welding in a couple of sheets to strengthen it back up. As he said it doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as it’s strong.

Ignore the line down the center I lazily pasted an image over the other rather than doing it properly


Before


After


Whilst I had the beam off tended to some rust under the boot floor and bare metaled the majority of it before painting it with more black Hammerite. Would’ve liked to take the fuel tank off but it looked like if it had come off it wouldn’t be going back on.





So that’s that! I haven’t got any photos of the beam on the car unfortunately. I always get too excited and take less and less photos the closer any job gets to being done because I just want to drive the car again. Ignore that just found a couple on my phone and a video of its first start after the work.



https://youtu.be/nJqInJQDEyI

And finally where it’s been since September. Hopefully giving it a clean tomorrow weather permitting.



Anyways that’s that, bit of a long update with a couple pics. More to come on the run up to pugfest!