Thursday, February 24, 2011

Unsuccessful

Today we attempted to get the Supra out of my garage and into my new storage space, but didn't really have much luck. The Supra is driven forward into my garage, so to get it out, it needs to be reversed. But when reversing the car, since it's missing the lower control arm, the wheel starts to fold outward. My friend Brian and I decided to pick up some wheel dollies to put under the rear wheels from Canadian Tire for $70, and they ended up working really well (even though it took me a little while to figure out how to put them together properly). They didn't exactly do what I intended for them to do, but they're going to come in really handy tomorrow.

Originally the plan was to roll the car up the flatbed with the dollies, but I hadn't really thought about it, because the flatbeds have ridges on the bed which the wheels of the dollies wouldn't go up. There's also a decent sized lip at the bottom which wouldn't work either.
The initial flatbed driver called in another guy who has a smooth back on the truck, without the ridges, so he came over and basically said "you're fucked", because there was no way it was going to work. Then he thought of a really good idea that we'll be using tomorrow. We are going to use the dollies to roll the car out to the road and get it lined up, then get it down on the ground, and then the flatbed guy is going to come meet us again with the smooth backed truck. We'll drive it on forwards, since the car rolls okay going straight forwards without much problem from the wheel, then reverse it off at the storage place. We're going to jack up the car and put the dollies back under on the flatbed when we get there, then let it roll down until the dollies can't roll anymore, which will be when they get to the bottom of the flatbed since they'll hit the lip, then we're going to have the flatbed drive out and let the car come down in place, then jack it up again to remove the dollies and drive it right into the storage spot. It sounds like a plan that should work well so hopefully it does!

As for tonight, we just wasted our time getting it jacked up and filling my street with flatbeds only to find it wouldn't work. I did get to start the car up and hear it run for a while though, which is something I can't complain about. With it sitting up on dollies the wheel has really pushed itself out, which is a little painful to look at, but hopefully it gets fixed up soon. Here's a picture:



I climbed around under there when I had it up on the jack just to check out the situation with the control arm, and unfortunately it doesn't look so good. The control arm ripped right through everything down there and looks to have bent the subframe a bit. So for now it's back to researching to see if a MA70 (USDM model of the MK3 Supra) has the same subframe as my car, and if it does then I'll try and find one in a part out to swap in. Here's a picture of the control arm and one of where the subframe is bent at the end of the control arm. You can see how badly it's mangled, I can't even comprehend what he must have been doing to cause that!





That's it for now, until I finally get the car moved over into storage tomorrow. I'll be taking all the tools I need to get this swapped, and be making a few very late night visits to storage and spending a while in there working on it. Most storage places prefer you don't work on your car there, so I'll need to be careful with it, but I'm really hoping to find the parts I need and get that fixed in the next little while. Then all that will need done to get it driving is to get that intercooler kit on there and I'll be good to go for spring!

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