Fitting front gas struts, plus a lot more

[Mollydog]

I had a busy day yesterday, my gas struts for my front bonnet arrived from Aliexpress, so I set about fitting them

Having to take off the plastic cover to cut holes for the ball-joints I  thought while at it I'd move the alarm out of the spare tyre well,

Taking out the plastic tyre well out after seeing another post on here regarding rust, I was expecting to see some myself and I wasn't let down

So what started off as a 30 minute job ended up taken all afternoon

Two things, I was planing on videoing the process but seeing the different tasks I ended up just taking photos of the jobs, and secondly, whenever I'm going to be working on greasy/dirty parts on a car I like to use rubber gloves, but as I started off only attempting the struts I didn't plan on using gloves and by the time I had moved on to other parts my hands had never seen this amount of grease/oil or just plane dirt on them for years

Anyway I'll start off with the gas struts

The parts





The cutting out for the ball joints











Then I realised the cut needed to be longer to allow the ball joint as this is different to the one fitted to the engine boot lid so needed to extend the cut



The other thing was that I needed to place washers behind the ball joint on the bonnet hinge otherwise the ball joint was making contact with the lid and wasn't a flush fit





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Now to the alarm, I had planed to fit it to the plastic tyre well, but thought maybe a solid location would be better,  so ended up fitting it on to the bolt holding the power steering fluid reservoir



I was lucky I found a bracket just right for the job









Lovely






One thing I noticed on the alarm and maybe why the alarm is very silent, I noticed this silicon all over the alarm, I'm thinking this might be something that was added by the previous owner to soften the alarm, is this correct or do they all come like this?




To the rust











Got my hands on my cordless angled drill





Shock and horror I noticed the nut holding the bolt on the universal joint had escaped



I planed on using lock nuts





The issues with the nylon lock nuts tightening a little too much and the nylon no longer performed and the other issue was that there wasn't enough bite at the end of the original bolt for my liking so I ended up fitting a new bolt and fitting double nuts to lock them in, this is a temporary fix for now as I think this universal joint needs to be taken out and either give it a good looking over or just replace it





After all this then I got on with using wax-oil on the parts I'd removed the rust, after an hour I went round again with the wax oil































While at it I took off the two rad brackets and after a light going over with a wire brush on the angled drill I sprayed them black





As this was all an unexpected mod, I'll replace these rusted bolts at a later date

[Chilli Girl]

Excellent pics and very well done with all the work - crikey, you have worked hard.

[Topdownman]

Good work.

I bet you feel relieved now you have a nut on the steering!

The silicone on the alarm is not standard so I am sure you are right and it is something done by a previous owner. The alarm move will make it louder so it may now sound standard volume again!

Look at all that lovely storage space you have now!

[J88TEO]

You may want to consider putting the boot on the steering u joint.