Thought it had gone too smoothly yesterday............

Well removing the front subframe with all its bits and pieces was easy.

Putting it back with drive shafts in the way was NOT!!

The day started well, I got the 2 front drive shafts into the CV joints in the hubs and I thought this is easy.

Its not, I couldn't get the subframe back in without stripping everything off it, and to fit the rack I found that I had to partially fit the frame at the rear, leaving the front unfitted, feed the rack in, then fit the rack mounts, and then fit the frame correctly.

Couldn't get much worse - wrong - couldn't get the track control arms and the ball joints to fit the struts and onto the frame. The only method was to compress the strut, and then fit the TCA and drag strut - took a while to fathom that one out - the reason is that the designers limited the suspension travel to protect the CV joints, but don't do it in the strut, instead there is a piece of metal in the subframe where the tca attaches that limits its downward travel - hence you cannot fit it until you compress the strut.

All done though, but took 8 hours to finish the front suspension.

Did a few quick other jobs, internal bulkhead mat, heater, and pedal box now fitted.

I really really hope the engine and box work OK, I do not want to ever have to repeat / reverse this process to gain access to them. This was definitely not engineered for production, but I have had to admire the skills of the FF engineers in getting this all in place and working in basically a standard shell. When they did the Jensen FF interceptor the shell was lengthened by 6" compared to a standard car

9 hours work today and not a lot to show for it, I hope tomorrow is better.

701 hours now worked, 9 today.