Amazon: Upper wishbone - check yours!

[mocambique-amazone]

Hello Faust,
other people here wrote about the most important point:
Don't add shim to "correct" the caster in a uneven way.
Two way's to do this: use shims in a shpe of a cone, between the dogbone and frontmember ANd under the head of the screw. If you do it this way the crew wont be bent.
I prefer to use studs instead of the screws.
often I found the screws overtightened. They shoudn't be thightend strong. Strong enough to hold the shims in place. Secured by the antirotation shim.
Grade 8 or 10.9 (metric) is too hard.

We never lost a screw, and studs, at this position. Even in hard race or rallye with tyres with a lot more of grip and with engines with a lot of power.

Good luck, and buy all four new, regards, Kay

[Faust]

Thanks for all the replies... gotta love this forum!

For the record, I've never added or removed shims on my Amazon - the only time they've been touched was on the passenger side (UK car) when I removed the upper wishbone to add polybushes - no room to change them in situ as the brake servo/booster takes up a fair bit of room. I made careful note of the shim order and they were replaced correctly.

New bolts & lock tabs arrived from Brookhouse today (along with nice new silicone radiator hoses) and I'll replace all 4 (i.e. both sides) this weekend.

Then it'll be a coolant flush & new hoses... and the pub. Obviously.

Mike

[c1800]

Here’s a couple posts, the thread started with an incident where the bolt broke when a 122 went over a bump in the road:

“The stock OEM bolts are grade 5, torque spec is 35 - 40 ft-lbs, lock tabs required. That should work for all normal use of these cars. Grade 8 bolts are stronger but require higher torque setting to achieve the same holding force. In this application, that may cause the threads in the crossmember to strip, as it wasn't designed for that torque.”

“^^^is right about the grade 5 bolts.

I started having problems with the upper A arm bolts in June of 96 at the first Vintage Volvo Grand Prix.

There’s some info here:
http://vclassics.com/archive/align.htm

The grade 5 should be fine for street cars and street tires but read what I wrote about caster changes/adjustments.
Grade 8 can’t be torqued properly into the crossmember (material is too soft) and for me resulted in a broken grade 8 bolt that was diagnosed at National Aerospace as “Rapid fatigue due to under torque”