🛠 Haynes’ World: Potholes take their toll!

From: Haynes - Thursday May 04,2023 11:30 am

Haynes’ World is where we show you what we’re doing with our own cars, bikes and other vehicles. This time, the UK's poor road surfaces mean Euan Doig has had to replace some of the Skoda Yeti’s suspension.

Have you ever had one of those jobs in which everything seems to be difficult or go wrong? It certainly happened to me recently.

You see, a combination of winter and chronic underfunding had taken its toll on the roads, not only where I live but seemingly everywhere I went.

This took a toll on my Skoda Yeti’s front suspension, and before long there was an ominous and annoying rattly clunk from the front left corner over even the most minor imperfections.

After some investigations, it became clear that the anti-roll bar drop link on the left-hand side was knackered. A new one was purchased and time set aside to carry out the swap. Not enough time, as it turned out.

The appointed day dawned… showery. I thought: “Ah well, it’s only a few bolts, so I’ll just dodge the showers.” I lifted both sides of the car and set it on axle stands, then removed the front left wheel.

I’d sprayed the 19mm nuts at either end of the droplink with Plusgas a day earlier, so hoped they’d come off quite easily. Nope.

I thought I’d break each nut loose initially using a socket, except the middle shank protruded so far that a socket wouldn’t fit, and I didn’t have a deeper socket. So, a spanner it was, with a second spanner hooked into it to provide extra leverage. Boom – it worked!

Then it was just a case of holding each centre shank still by inserting an Allen key into it, and loosening the nuts using a spanner. Except the nuts didn’t come off easily. Indeed, despite me using lots of spray to ease their path, they fought me with every single turn.

And then the centre shank started to turn around the Allen key, which meant I couldn’t loosen the nuts anymore. At which point the showers I’d been dodging caught up with me and emptied the contents of the sky onto the entire proceeding. There was only one thing for it: tea.

I had a think and decided the only way to remove the droplink was to hacksaw each shank, so I set to work.

Great! I’d got about halfway through the first one when the hacksaw blade snapped. Did I have a spare? Of course not…

FIND OUT WHY THE REPAIR STRETCHED INTO DAY 2!

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