grant mills

Mike, If you have a 7/8" sway bar, the bushings from Dan Booth (Nostalgic) would be a perfect fit if you are using the original brackets, and would need NO opening up. They are meant for the 7/8" sway bar. Where did you get the bushings such that they are too small (assuming about 3/4" hole diameter)? Remember that the correct bushings may seem tight, but liberal use of dishwasher soap on both the interior hole and the sway bar should make things much easier. I have not yet installed the bar, but I have the interior bushings in place and it is just a matter of making some supports to hold one end of the bar as I first work on the other end (cross my fingers) If you are stuck with too small bushings, I used a dremel w/ steel cutting rod at the end of the shank. It was small and started to make cavities along the interior. I would then switch to the largest grinding stone that would fit in the hole (or to the largest sandpaper drum) again with the dremel. This larger stone/sandpaper would smooth out the hole. I needed the high speed to be able to cut out the rubber quickly. The steel cutting rod does fast removal and the larger grinders do proper, slower, finishing work. An electric hand drill just does not have the RPMs that are needed to cut the rubber.

Well, after many months I have almost finished the front suspension. It has been a litany of incorrect parts and learning new(old) things about the car. First, I was lucky to have a cousin in Vancouver with a business that had a warehouse in Washington state (and a US bank credit card) O'Reilly will not ship to Canada, nor will they accept credit cards based on non-US banks (That means my American Express from a canadian branch is not accepted) Once received, the local shop did a good job of replacing bushings on A-arms, king pins and bell crank. Now, a few words of caution. If you have a 1" front sway bar, I have only found 2 sources for replacing the bushings. One is Dave Thibeault who, if I understood correctly from our conversation, make a bracket that fits the old Avanti support but accepts the new style of bushings which are too small for the old bracket. Essentially a smaller bracket. The other is Dan Booth (at Nostalgic) who sells bushings that fit the old bracket, but had been modified by Avanti after they stopped installing 1" sway bars and moved to 7/8" bars. Since Avanti had a large lot of the 1" hole bushings, they glued an insert into the hole to bring its size down. I went with Dan's bushings and ground out the insert to bring the hole back to 1" (dremel w/ steel grinder works slow but effective) It easily slide onto the sway bar (using plenty of liquid dish soap to smooth the bar). I am now waiting on a refund for the "wrong external sized" bushings I mailed back to "Avanti International Inc." over a month ago Second word of caution: Any aftermarket front shock is NOT going to fit. DO NOT believe RockAuto when they advertise their replacement shocks for any pre-86 Avanti. Those shocks ALL have a 3" long base plate (end to end) while the centers of the two stove bolts that hold them to the lower A-arm are 3.5" apart (the Lark chassis). They cannot be secured. I had order KYB shocks and dealing with their support desk, I was told they have NO shocks with a wider plate on the bottom. "Gabriel" automatically acknowledged that I asked them about this issue and would get right back to me....but crickets. In the end, RockAuto acknowledged the problem, indicating that many other Avanti owners had complained about the same thing and offered me a refund (and paid return shipping) even though I was months over their return date policy. Given problems with returning parts across the border, I decided to build brackets for the lower supports. Using 3/16" flat steel, I cut eight 2" pieces from a 1" wide piece. I then gouged out a U shape from one side, approximately 1/4" deep in four of them. It is about 1" wide and tightly surrounds the flange of the shock. I next drilled out a 3/8" hole beyond the cutout and ground away the metal to join the two. The other 4 simply had a 3/8" hole drilled at one end. Now I will (and hopefully it will work having just finished the grinding an hour ago and still wanting to do a little more precision filling) attach the extensions to the 3/16" thick shock supports. and use the other single hole plate to act as a clamp, covering both the new extension and the base of the shock. It may be that there are suppliers that have front shocks with the wider support base, but I have been at this all summer and have gotten tired of the parts misunderstandings I had with some suppliers. I strongly recommend Dan Booth at Nostalgic and am thank full to Dave Thibeault for suggesting him as an alternative to his product. I had easily ordered from Nostalgic years back but had mistakenly thought they had retired.

After reviewing all the postings on this site, I have ordered a set of coil springs from O'Reilly...SP08055...which are a match to MOOG CC655....which have been touted as a very close replacement for the original front springs. Given the problems with cross border shopping, I am hoping to get them in about a week. My question is: do they require any spacers? The photos of side to side comparisons I have seen make them seem just slightly shorter than the original...or does it not matter and I just get a bit more rake.

I will look for a replacement canister...but the leak turned out to be a little harder to access than I first thought. After removing the lower rad hose, I found I also had to remove the electric fan support (with fans) so that meant removing the upper rad hose so there was room to remove the fans. The tranny coolant leak was at the connection of the 45 degree adaptor to the rad. A little teflon tap and a tightening up cleared up that location and teflon tape on the hose connector to that adaptor ensured that there will be no more leaks. When putting the electric fans back in place, the battery got in the way so that also had to be removed before I could get the fans and their support frame back in place......How i wish I had small hands so I did not need to clear out a few square feet of area in order to work on things. It was 10 minutes of slow work on the connectors and 2 days of removing and replacing parts to get access.

I have had an ongoing leak at the connections of the transmission cooler lines to the radiator. No more than a few drops a month but it is annoying so I am going to replace the seals (or connectors..what ever is needed) at the rad connections. The connections are hard to access because of the vacuum canister, so I intend to disconnect the canister for ease of access. I am not comfortable with the idea of removing and bypassing the canister, and I have read numerous postings in other forums where they indicate that the canister should be recharged as it is prone to failing after about 70K miles (my car has 72K) Those forums also seem to indicate that replacement foam/parts for the canister are no longer available. So I would like some critics of the transmission cooler line work and comments on the vacuum canister.

No emissions testing done up here in Canada. In attempting to replace my fuel pump, I have to make room to be able to work in the confined area. At the moment I am (trying to) remove the air pump having taken the alternator out. Are there any major issues in simply not reinstalling it? I would expect to replace the current (original) cat. convertor with one that has better exhaust flow and no air hose input. What else might I be looking at as an area of importance? grant

removed spark plugs to check a few cylinders...all were dry, so on to replace the fuel pump...which raises the question I am asking in a new post

Here is a scan of the relevant page from the shop manual. (assuming I am not breaking any copyright laws)

I only use Shell premium gas that, by all accounts, had no ethanol added. But I do use a fuel stabilizer for winter storage. Jim, thanks for the tip on checking the cylinders.

While working on the rear sway bar bushings (now completed satisfactorily) the car was tilted forward where the rear was suspended about 18 inches higher than normal for a few weeks as I had to get the new bushings replaced with a larger set. On the last few days of this i noticed a pool of liquid under the front that seemed to be gas/oil. When I dropped the rear end back down, I decided to do an oil change as I could not seem to get a reading on the dip stick. when I removed the oi drain plug, I got a strong steady stream of over 10 litres of liquid, overflowing my oil pan and again covering about 10 sq.ft. of floor....So I have gas in my oil pan and I need to know the cause to fix it. Cause 1: (unlikely but I'll put it out there) the gas flowed through the fuel line into the carb and from there down into the engine. Cause 2: (most probable but it is year and half old fuel pump) The gas flowed through a failure in the bellows of the mechanical fuel pump and entered the oil that way. Given the "fun" I had replacing the last fuel pump I would prefer to get some ideas on diagnostics to determine it that is indeed the fault. Any ideas out there? grant