Rear arms - wrong way round?

[roverbarmy]

When you are up to your backside in alligators, it is often difficult to remember that the object of the exercise was to drain the swamp!!!

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Originally Posted by roverbarmy

When you are up to your backside in alligators, it is often difficult to remember that the object of the exercise was to drain the swamp!!!

Precisely.

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Ok, I've wire brushed the old uncut arm and there's an L mark here. I think we can safely say that it's not an R. So this is the old Left arm (a factory arm).



Now here's the uncut old Left arm side by side with the the new Indian arms. The one on the right is the odd man out. The two on the left have bushes pointing the same way, so it's safe to say they're both Left arms.



Here they are again from the opposite angle - now the Left arms are the two on the right.



Here they are again, this time with L and R labels on the Indian pair - so there's no mistaking them from here on.



I've bolted the Left Indian (on the left above) into the subframe. Now the gap between the edge of it and the edge of the subframe is down to around half an inch (it was one inch before - see post 5). This doesn't seem right to me.

NB. I'd photograph it but there's no point - it'll just look like the second pic in post 5 but with a smaller gap.

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Just to confirm where the factory marks are, here's a pic I found a while ago of an arm in Portugal. (I think it was bought by Paul, aka The Gas Man).



The L mark is in exactly the same place on my old L arm.

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Here's my old L arm again, followed by Mike's pic from post 7.





So what's going on? Why has the gap between arm and subframe halved?

[roverbarmy]

There will be some "give" in the rubber. If not enough, the only other explanation I can think of is that the end of the arm and bush have been welded in the wrong position??? The "give" in the rubber bush may however be enough to cope with 1/2" difference at the other end of the arm (the final position determined by the connection to the hub). Both "new" and old arms in my picture are Rover originals. The "new" arm was one from the Portugese seller.
Mike

[Blink]

Originally Posted by roverbarmy

There will be some "give" in the rubber. If not enough, the only other explanation I can think of is that the end of the arm and bush have been welded in the wrong position??? The "give" in the rubber bush may however be enough to cope with 1/2" difference at the other end of the arm (the final position determined by the connection to the hub). Both "new" and old arms in my picture are Rover originals. The "new" arm was one from the Portugese seller.
Mike

The bush ends on your Portuguese left arm, my old left arm and my Indian left arm all seem to be welded at just the same angle - so I don't think there's any mistake in the welding position on my Indian one.

At the moment (off the car), there's about 1/4" worth of play between the upper arm bush and its fixing bolt though the subframe - so the gap can go from 1/2" down to 1/4" if I swing the arm sideways by hand. When the outer end is bolted into place though, the gap will become fixed but it'll be somewhere between 1/4" (dangerously close) and 1/2" (still too close).

The question is whether or not to install the subframe with the arms like this.