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This is Jemal at Mini Mania and today I'm filling in for Tony. He's become our regular youTube guy, that a lot of people know already. I have a lot more experience with these Mini Subframes, having built my own car and others. I talk to people all the time providing Tech Support for how to put these together.
So here's a chance, somebody ordered one of these. They were available- you could buy this entire Subframe as a part number. That's been discontinued, and so we thought- well we could get all the bits and duplicate that. So today we're going to show some of the assembly of the Springs. Right now I've got the Stock Springs in it and we're going to go back and forth.
I'm going to put in the High- Low adjustable Cones that allow you to adjust the Ride Height of the Car, with a wrench, literally by leaning under the Car. We're going to show the differences in how the Coil Springs go versus the Stock Rubber Springs. We'll talk a little bit about the Back Plates the Brake Lines, various other things that you run into.
This will be useful if you're doing anything from changing out Springs, Cones, High- Lo's, dealing with, rebuilding these Control Arms, etc. So there's a number of useful things here. Let's get started. We'll just kind of show what we have here. We have the Stock set up in here, just for examples sake. I talk to people a lot about, do you need a Spring Compressor, how do these go in, what is the order of assembly?
Basically on the rears, you do not need a Spring Compressor. The Suspension travel, when you undo the Shock, there's plenty of travel to release and unload the Rear Springs. It's important to keep in mind that this is upside down for the convenience of being able to show this. Were it right side up, the Suspension would droop and the parts would just fall out, literally.
By having it upside down, we have the weight of the Control Arm holding everything together for the convenience of assembly. On the MIni if you the undo the Shock, this Swing Arm drops low enough that there's no load on the Suspension.
So here's the Stock set up. I'm just going to pry this. Here's the Trumpet, people wonder Trumpet? Well it looks like a Trumpet. That's the item that basically goes from the Knuckle where the Spring is supported to the Spring itself. The Spring has a little Collar to that will grab onto the Subframe here, let me pop it out gently as possible and here's the rubber Spring. They can really grab ahold when they're rusty- people go "these are not coming out". They'll rust in place, but hopefully with new parts like this, it's a nice clean assembly.
So there's the Stock Spring, the Stock Trumpet. This is what the Mini's Suspension is. These are the Springs and this piece is known as the Trumpet that, basically, reaches from the Spring horizontally mounted over to the Joint Knuckle which is sort of cantilevered to the rear Swing Arm.
So, it's kind of an unusual Suspension- certainly in that your Spring is horizontal to the ground and the rest of it is leverage. What we've got is very easy to install. These, you don't really need a Spring Compressor to undo them. These, you certainly don't because you can turn this all the way down where it's considerably shorter than Stock.
So literally I've got to lift the Suspension up in order to put this in place, then you can see the whole assembly- Spring, it's Cap, the Hi-Lo piece, which replaces the Trumpet and here's the adjustable-these are just threadless Studs, that fit together like so. We wobble that Joint Knuckle. I'm going to engage the stud part of the Joint Knuckle in that stud and then as I relax and I lower the Suspension back down, you see that everything holds itself in place, but that right there is the installed Spring and High-Low.
This High-Low this is what provides the adjustability for the ride height. This is a Jam Nut here that locks that up against the Spring and that turns, that's your Jam Nut, this piece here. Again, there's no load on the car, I can simply unload the Suspension and you can see how I can unscrew, basically, there's a long bolt here and with a Wrench from under the car you can get to this.
That raises and lowers the ride height of the Car, you tighten the Jam Nut up, you're good to go. This would be a very low car at this rate. I know from experience in my own car car, which sits very low but I've got this out, probably a good inch of thread showing. That's kind of an average way that these go together. This will need to be extended to reach the Stock ride height.
You can see when it's installed, everything hold itself together. Again, this is the upside down for convenience. If the car was right side up, you'd want to install the Shock or something to prevent this from drooping and you can see how pieces just fall right out, if you allow the Suspension to droop. Hold it back in place, make sure the Joint Knuckles engage cleanly, make sure the stud here's engaged cleanly and that's about it.
Hold it back in place. When we flip this over we'll probably have to tie this somehow to keep all this stuff compressed to hold it in place. We've shown really how simple the Suspension System is. Really not much to it. You don't need any special tools you just have to position everything properly and everything pops together.
Let's go over to the other side over here where we can have a couple of moments to talk about the actual Trailing Arm and the differences between the wet and dry ones.
Please see the next Video-Article: How-To Upgrade to a Hi-Lo Suspension in your Classic Mini No 2