Ball joints, indeed.  They turned out to be a bit of a head scratcher when fitting, but more about that later..

After poly-bushing the front lower wishbones I set about assembling the various other sub-assemblies that make up the front end; springs & shocks, bush & ball joint the upper wishbones etc, and pressed the bushes into the rear De Dion beam.  Let’s talk about that, first..

I was dreading this work, if I’m honest.  The De Dion beam is quite a chunk of metal so it’s not easy to manhandle around the workshop on my own, which ruled out using the hydraulic press to push them in as I just couldn’t hold the beam and operate the press, so I broke out the threaded bearing press box (this one, to be exact) and set to work finding the right diameter sleeves for the job.  Once I’d selected those I found that they were too long to fit in the available space between the bush and the other side of the beam, d’oh!

 

If my lathe were working that would be a two minute job to reduce one sufficiently and keep it square but sadly it isn’t so I had to resort to a socket on one side.  It took a few attempts before I found the right size socket and got the bushes to go in square but once they started they went in like butter. Job done!

 

Next up I thought I’d assemble the front & rear shocks.  Three years of storage in a less than dry environment had seen a little corrosion appear on the upper & lower eyes of a couple of them so I thought I’d spray them up black rather than leave them just plated, and I think they turned out quite well if I’m honest:

As you can see I had the springs on – I painted the rears with their springs in place but the fronts were painted before the springs were assembled onto the shocks; I should have done both this way, really, but it was only half way through assembly I thought about painting them..
Putting the springs on the shocks was both simple and difficult – the rears are easy as the open length of the shocks is longer than the free length of the springs, making installation a simple case of winding the spring perch down to the bottom, slipping the collar off, dropping the spring on, slipping the collar back in at the top and winding the perch up to take up the slack.

The front springs, however, have a longer free length than the open length of the shock, so you’ll either need a set of spring compressors with small fingers or some improvisation with a pair or three of ratchet straps.  After consulting the internet I settled on using ratchet straps and they were on in minutes – though I must say, even with the spring perches wound up against the compressed spring, when you release the ratchet straps be prepared for a bit of a shock! And definitely don’t release the ratchet straps before you wind up the spring perch! I take no responsibility if you damage yourself..

 

After my success there I decided to hang one of the shocks off the chassis, just to feel like I’m really getting somewhere:

 

And then set about installing the special Dax upper ball joints into the upper wishbones.  That turns out to be slightly less obvious than you might think as at first glance the space to receive the ball joint seems narrower than the balljoint & spacers:

 

It’s not as bad as it looks, though, because it turns out that with a bit of pressure on the ‘wide’ end of the wishbone the ball joint end opens up a mm or so and the ball joint slides right in.  If you don’t have a helper (I had my other half there at the time) then a ratchet strap gently applied would do the same thing, I reckon.