Dubious Spring Compressors and misc October

Just finishing up some work for the RWC for the van sale. Did the rear brake pads, rear shocks, and front shocks. Front is a little tricky as I lost my spring compressors and tie-rod-separator tools many decades ago in a Macca's carpark in Albury. A story for another day.

Spring compressors run ~$70-100 from SuperCheapAuto, but I'm cheaper than that. I fished through a literal junk pile at work and grabbed some bits from salvage that we harvest from a customer job which replaces some mechanical lifting mechanisms for an electric system. It's a little light-weight for small-truck-springs, but it'll have to do. It's M12 threaded rod. I could have used some larger stuff, but that's legit' stock as opposed to bits I pulled from the trash box.

Garrick took a great shot of Pix'.

A junk pile of bits, just waiting to become the next gizmo of dollar-savings.

Hmmm, surely I can make a spring COMPRESSOR from these spring EXPANDER bits??

Begone excess bits. I just want the hook and the thread.

...but I'm gonna need four hooks to make two spring compressors. Good thing the junk box has surplus.

I don't want thread in two of the hooks. Goodbye thread.

The hook on the left is bored through and spins freely. The hook on the right is threaded for the rod and compresses the spring as I reverse the thread. This setup ensures I don't drive the rod up through the wheel well in a build where the hook on the left was threaded.

The proper ones swap for reversed thread in a top and bottom split. In theory the rod stays in a static position while you compress from both ends, but it NEVER works out that way.

M12 rod vs. small truck spring. She's a lil' bendy.

It'll be easy to lift this monster shaft out of the steering body right???

I ended up having to drop the entire steering sub-frame to get the sucker out. No spring compressor was going to get that spring compressed enough to get this job done. I wish this was the bolt-on type, not the through-fitting type. I should probably re-seat that left compressor too...naaaa...

Now all I gotta do is harvest a bunch of these bits, fit them to the new shock, and reverse the process. Easy right???!!?!? Right!!?!?!??

Toolbox

I found a Sidchrome wall cabinet toolbox on hard rubbish last week. It's pretty rough. Very muddy, dunno why. Covered in bogan stickers. I did a de-grease, scrub, and hose-down. It probably needs some rust treatment here and there, but I'm going to leave it for now and see how it behaves in a dry environment.

Unfortunately I removed a historic sticker from the cabinet. In the "before" photos you can see a "Proto tools" sticker on the inside of the door. The brand is a U.S brand that supplied for Sidchrome in the brief period when they stopped manufacture in Australia and moved manufacture to Taiwan or Korea or something in the early 90's. Oh well. That places the cabinet in the early 90's era anyhow. It was an absolutely absurd selection of tools. An upper row of ring-ring spanners. A middle row of ring-open spanners, and a lower row of open-open spanners. What an absolute waste of everyone's time. When was the last time you wanted anything other than a ring-open spanner? Never.

Not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it. I don't have a man-cave to display it in, do not own sidchrome tools, and the few display tools I do have are radical mis-matches. (seen below). I dunno...really trying to get rid of stuff at the moment.

Oh and I found a small step stool on hard rubbish also. Handy, as I was browsing online for one anyhow. Expensive little critters.