Alfa Front Suspension Rebuild

Mar 18, 2007 update to the Alfa Romeo 2000 GTV project car

We just realized this morning that we’ve owned our Alfa GTV for a year now. Wow, we’ve come a long way in that time!

For a one-year anniversary present, we started rebuilding the GTV’s front suspension. We started by carefully unbolting things.

Next, we put a bunch of suspension pieces in a make-shift hot tank for degreasing. A few days in undiluted “Purple Power” degreaser will clean just about anything. It strips paint after a while too. And dissolves aluminum. Yikes.

We pulled the parts out of the bucket of degreaser and with minimal scrubbing, they’re clean enough to paint. We’ll be using POR-15 to paint the control arms.

We coated our suspension arms and other bits with POR15 paint. The paint is quite tough and acts as a “poor man’s powder coating” with good abrasion and chip resistance, as well as rust stoppage.

We pressed polyurethane bushings into the new adjustable upper control arms. The arms are adjustable for more negative camber.

The front suspension is now ready for new springs and Koni shocks.

We adjusted the front Koni’s to 2/3rd stiff before we installed them. We like the front of our racers to be well damped, helping transitional response.

The front suspension is now capable of supporting the weight of the car, but we’re waiting for some new brake pads from Porterfield before we button everything up.