The final hurdle before our tech day was the axle boots rubbing the lower lock collar on the rear coilovers. The boots can be compressed a bit to improve clearance but I want to make sure this area is smooth and doesn’t have anything that could damage the boot if they do make contact. Changing to a ring/collar that takes a pin type spanner wrench instead of the current notched rings I have would do the trick, but there wasn’t enough time to source one among all the various shock body sizes/thread pitches out there.
Called Feal up and they sent down a spare lower shock mount… looks like it belongs to a Subaru or similar. That’s perfect, all I needed was the threaded top portion. Cut two rings off the top to make new lock rings from:
Cleaned up the rings and drilled four holes in the outward side of each ring juuuust shallow enough that they didn’t go through to the inner threaded side. Then we couldn’t find the pin type spanner wrench at the shop so I threw a quick and dirty one together:
The lock ring now clears the boot, has the same OD as the lower portion of the coilover and has a smooth outer surface in the event of contact:
And with that I installed the rear coilovers and then the wheels and set her on the ground for the first time in a year! Tomorrow she’ll be out in front of the shop for our tech day.