A is for Aggravating

 I tackled the driver's side suspension. I did the passenger side a little while back, and it went okay. The replacement A-arms I got are not as good quality as the OEM ones, and the welding on the lower shock mount had failed immediately when I installed the shock on the passenger side. I had to jankily weld it up and while ugly, it's solid. 

 So, not wanting that to happen again, I preemptively booger-welded the lower A-arm, so it looked like the original and you can't tell which is which now.

Or maybe you can. At any rate, the grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't.

The top arm is easy, just remove the mounting bolt and the upper ball joint nut and pickle that baby off. This appears to be an original A-arm, as the ball joint is riveted on and the bushings are really trashed. 

 Of course problems ensued on the last nut on the bottom one. The spring mounts to the body at top and the lower arm at bottom, so my method here is not to use the compressor when disassembling, but jack up the lower arm to relieve the tension on its mount to the body, unbolt it, then lower the whole thing down and pop out the coil spring from its remaining tension (for which installation is NOT the reverse of removal). The aft nut however had been really beat upon, and the stud broke loose inside the cross member and just spun with the rusted beaten nut. 

The stud has a round head which I presume is tack-welded to the inside of the crossmember, or possibly it was a bolt with a rounded-off head, but at any rate it was round and there was no way to get a wrench on it. I have a trashed flat blade I use for various prying purposes and I hammered that in against the round head, which did not work....at first.

The nut would turn about a quarter turn before binding again and breaking the tension from the screwdriver. Each time I hammered it again and would get another quarter turn. This went on for a while, but the pattern held up and slowly I got the nut off. This was a joyous moment as I did NOT want to start cutting things, which is always nondeterministic. 

Eventually I got the A-arm off, and it was in worse shape than the top.

That bolt, however, is in bad shape and I don't want to put things back together without trying to salvage it. I don't have a die in its 12 x 1.25 size to clean up the threads, so I downed tools and went off to the orangey-colored hardware store to get one. They did not have one - in fact they had almost no taps or dies, just a few sizes in a kit that was not desirable. I tried the down-low blue place next with no better result, and then came home in annoyance and ordered one online. 

I went ahead and replaced the tie rod ends (tagliando di controllo!) and with a few minutes left, screwed on the rear panels by the back seat that hide the convertible top windows when it's folded down. 
 

So next steps, clean up that stud, install the bottom A-arm, tighten everything down, and take it for an alignment. Aligning this car is dead simple, but it uses shims for the camber, slipped in on the lower A-arm studs which somehow always seems to confuse people. 

The car was in an accident in the distant past, and had a front corner sloppily welded back on. It's holding, and is nothing really structural but I might try my hand at hammering this even and welding it (rather more neatly than my own other attempt on the A-arm).