Ramps

I struggled yesterday with the trolley jack. Today at lunch time I thought about how I was going to get the car onto axle stands, I ended looking at low profile trolley jacks. The prospect of having to fork out more money for something I didn’t really need seemed crazy. The JCB trolley I have is fairly highly rated and has been a reliable and good bit of kit.

The idea that came to mind was to make some ramps out of wood. There was some 1″ thick MDF shelving kicking around, so I nailed three together for each side and staggered them by about four inches each to get a ramped edge and then placed them behind the front wheels and reversed up onto them. It worked a treat and I could get the jack under the front of the car to the front suspension arm mounts, jack the car up remove the ramp from the corresponding side and put and axle stand in before repeating for the other side.

Once it was up on axle stands, it was a case of both wheels off, bumper off, lights out and washer bottle out. Then it was time to get to work on the rust. Made reasonable progress on the OS front wheel arch and the OS engine bay. It’s going to need some chemical metal under the arch before it gets painted. Managed to snap one of the headlight mounting bolts trying to get them off and the NS side bumper mount wasn’t bolted in. After the bumper was off it’s become apparent why – the metal threaded insert plate’s missing.