I’m Saving The Autopian SsangYong And It Ssucks

Two days have passed since I ordered just about everything I need to make the hideous Ssangyong Rodius — a vehicle The Autopian purchased as a joke for its beloved, picky designer, Adrian, who opted to wear a paper bag while driving it  — road-worthy again. Sadly, the parts needed to keep the ugly diesel van out of the junkyard have yet to leave the warehouse and begin the journey. All I really need is the springs. If the substitute springs are good, then we can make some headway, but if my gamble doesn’t pay off, then I’m stuck in customs import hell waiting for them to arrive. Not to mention, these Rodius-correct springs would end up about three or four times more expensive than using the Rexton nearly-right ones.

Parts For The Beloved Rhodius Are…Not Easy To Find. So I Bought Springs For A Different Model

In case you’ve forgotten or missed my last article or PedalBox Garage episode, our particular early-model Rodius has two possible suspension spring set-ups up front. A short 325mm for the 2.0L diesel, and a longer 375mm for the 2.7 diesel. The short ones aren’t exactly common, but they’re not too hard to find in stock. The longer ones are pure unobtanium, at least in the UK. There’s no stock of them anywhere, and ordering through what’s left of the Ssangyong Dealer network has a lead time of at least nine weeks.

So with those two equally long and unappealing options, I crossed my fingers and ordered the Ssangyong Rexton II springs, which are 10mm longer but for the same 2.7l drivetrain as the Rodius. I pray I’ll get away with it.

As convenient as it would be to just order the one spring and put the left strut back together and move on, convention and good practice mean both sides should be replaced to ensure even and equal performance and no odd driving characteristics. There’s no way a brand new spring and a potentially 20-year-old spring will ride right together, so best to just do both, even if it might be a tiny bit hacky. At least it should be equally hacky on both sides, and whoever ends up the lucky owner of this fine steed doesn’t have to worry about the other side snapping any time soon, and they can’t use it as an excuse to rid the world of its glory.

Back to parts. My hope was to get all of this done in a weekend: strut off, swap the springs and reinstall Saturday, chuck the new discs and pads in on Sunday, and there’s a slim chance we might have this thing MOT’d before it even expires. Of course, I’ve scuppered that already by forgetting to order a CV boot, but maybe I can find one of those locally, since it’s all just Mercedes running gear …

[Ed Note: I’d just like to point out that our plan was to actually scrap the Rhodius. Adrian (Clarke) couldn’t just hold onto it, it failed MOT, and nobody — I mean nobody — wanted to buy it. At the last second, I found this Adrian, who volunteered to take the car off our hands and fix it. Yes, we literally had to pay someone to buy our Rhodius. But hey, we’re getting content! – DT]

Apparently, no, just another unobtanium part, meaning this won’t be the rapid, one-weekend turnaround I’d hoped for. Moreover, this isn’t the last of the problems that will befall this plan. Perhaps this is a sign? A foreshadowing that every attempt to keep this car functioning will be beset on all sides with looming uncertainty, caught betwixt seized fasteners and a maddening hunt for what will inevitably turn out to be ill-fitting parts and broken tools.

Or it’s just unpopular, and with the demise of the dealer network, domestic stock is non-existent. It would certainly explain the high demand for second-hand parts, which caught me out and denied me an easy swap for a complete used strut to slot in without having to risk life and limb disassembling one.

A Greasy Job

I’ve been mentally going over how to pull the strut out while removing as few parts as possible. Not that it matters much on this side, as I’ve also got to take the hub out to do the wheel bearing and get to the CV boot. But establishing the minimal cut-set of removal will pay dividends, as on the other side I hope to get away with disturbing as little as possible.

Were this a McPherson strut, as every other car I’ve had to replace springs and shocks on has been before, this would be fairly easy; pop the whole assembly off the top of the hub, drop out the top mount, and it’s free.

But free is a relative term; I don’t think I’ve ever been lucky enough to actually “just” (as I’m sure a Haynes manual would judgingly put it) remove the strut from the hub in situ. I’ve had to cut away a pinch bolt one sliver at a time with a grinder, eating it away bit by bit through the pinch gap as it’s tapped into the fresh void, all to release a multilink control arm from the hub. Fortunately, this doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as bad, either in condition or access to fasteners.

The Rodius upper control arm pins the top of the strut in place, and the tie-rod, sway bar, drive shaft, and hub, along with the chassis itself, constrain it in all directions at the base. Removing the upper control arm will probably be the quickest option for the non-broken-spring side. But for this side, that’s actually the only piece I can leave in place.

Every bolt released and every piece removed opens more doorways to another potentially catastrophic episode of “while I’m here, I might as well just…” It would be so easy to fall down the pathway of engine out, powder coat the subframes, and have someone come to do some paintless dent repair while I meticulously try and blend in the rattle-canned areas to the rest of the 20-year-old paint…

No. This car cannot become another driveway ornament. Not least because it’s blocking the Thunderbird’s triumphant return (which might yet be on a truck due to its lack of compression on at least one cylinder)

Either way, three boxes of parts will be here by 2pm, and ignoring the fact that it’s already 3 pm with no sign of them, it’s time to get as far as I can through disassembly. With this courier it seems, every delivery is a gamble.

Despite having a plan to try the minimal disturbance approach as a test for the other side, I gave up on it pretty quickly. Be it a subconscious decision that the upper control arm is by far the easiest way to do it, or just plain old distraction in the process, we’ll never know. The top mounts looked easy, so they went first.

Three bolts and ample clear space above them. If these go badly, I might just go weep into the tools for a moment, curse some bloodlines, and consider burning the whole thing to the ground. Fortunately, they put up little to no fight and now that they’re loose, I can move down. I’m relieved but still suspicious of what problems are ahead.

Next up: brakes. They’re coming off to replace the discs and pads anyway, so no point leaving them on the hub and making that more awkward to work around than it needs to be. Two bolts on the carrier and that should be all that’s nee … WHY AM I COVERED IN GREASE?!

Oh yeah. The CV boot is leaking. It’s been ejecting its contents like an overfed child on a carousel for what could be all 5000 miles since the last test, and as a result, the inside of the hub, carrier, caliper, and the bolts are covered in nearly a quarter inch of grease mixed with every possible speck of dirt imaginable along the way.

Fan. Tastic.

There is an upside, though; while every bolt is covered in this thick goo, every bolt is covered in this thick water-repelling goo! Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. Although the bolts are tight — tight enough that I had to employ the trolley jack on the ratchet handle to get them loosened at the start — there’s no evidence of corrosion. For an assembly at the business end of the salty roads’ abuse, it’s a pleasant surprise.

The Right Tool For The Job

Removing the caliper from the disc was itself a challenge I should have foreseen, knowing as I did that the discs were pretty badly lipped. With no easy way to push the pistons back in effectively, this meant prying the calipers off. Good job, these pads were already destined to be replaced, and if they hadn’t, they’d need to be now after being chewed up going over the lip.

Were I a smart man, I’d have released the disc retainer screw while the caliper was still in place and stopped it rotating with some help on the brakes. However, I am not a smart man and instead I had to brace it with the crow bar thanks to some genius over tightening it.

Releasing the hub nut was delightfully uneventful, although I probably need to source a new one per the instructions. Freeing the lower ball joint was equally simple, or at least it should have been had I not forgotten to actually remove the bolts after taking the three nuts off before trying to pry it free.

I really wish I were making this up for some klutzy, “oh look how silly I am forgetting to do things, deary me!” schtick. But no, I am simply not a smart man.

One slip of the hammer later, the tie rod is out of the hub, and finally the lack of CV grease on a bolt has come back to haunt me. The half-inch of stickout from the nylock nut corroded just enough to make its entire run out a fight from start to finish. Perhaps I should have just stuck the impact on and sent it, but I was trying to avoid melting the nylon, the very same nylon that is probably trashed as a result of the corrosion. Instead, I spent 10 minutes going one-sixth of a turn at a time with the breaker bar the whole way out. I should get a T-shirt made up with “I am not a smart man” on it.

Eventually, after releasing the top mount fully, disconnecting the drop link from the sway bar, and prying the lower arm down further, the strut is free. It’s only taken three hours, but in the meantime, there’s been a delivery!

One box out of three. And it wasn’t the springs.

Skip forward a few more days and the springs have arrived, but there’s a fresh new problem to deal with. While trying to take the old spring apart using my trusty widowmaker spring compressors, I found they don’t actually fit between the coils. I could just throw an impact on the top nut and burst the whole thing across the drive to release the old one, but there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to get them off again once the new spring is in.

Furthermore, not only is the new spring longer by 10mm at rest, but the installed length of the spring on the strut is heavily compressed by at least 50-60mm. My clamps need to pull down at least three inches (75mm) on the new ones to get close to fitting, probably more – and there’s just no way they’ll manage that.

Fortunately, on hearing what I was doing, a friend with a commercial garage offered to help with the spring swap. Although I assured him I’d probably be fine, it was at this point that I gleefully accepted his offer and went down to CMC workshop to use their beefy 12,000N spring compressor to get the job done with far less peril.

You may wonder why we used such an antiquated (in reality, only 30-or-so-year-old) looking tool. Despite being perfectly good and capable for the job, surely any garage would have a hydraulic or pneumatic compressor these days. And you’d be right, but Geoff had thought one more step ahead than I. Once we swapped the springs over, there was a chance the top mount alignment and the lower shock bolt alignment would no longer be the same as they were, and I’d have to adjust the alignment on the car. So he planned to loan me this much-easier-to-transport set, just in case.

Sure enough, the old spring was very much done for.

I have a healthy respect for springs under compression like this (above), which I don’t ever want to lose lest I next lose a tooth, an eye, or worse.

The new spring went on with little to no drama. It’s amazing how having the Right Tool™ (even when you thought you already had it) makes the job so much easier. We got the top mount aligned as closely as we could and I went on my merry way, tools and all.

I Have No Idea How This Thing Is Going To Drive

It turns out the alignment was extremely close, just a few degrees of tweaking was enough, and that was done with a chunky screwdriver before slotting the bolt home. Just one more to do now, or so I thought.

While I may not be a smart man, I am clearly a very lucky one. As much as convention would be to replace both springs when one snaps, some previous owner down the line obviously didn’t think so.

The driver’s side spring is almost brand new. The coloured marks are still visible under what is a very thin layer of dirt clinging to an absolutely pristine powder coat. Incidentally, are these coloured marks alignment? QA? Someone enlighten me, please.

This can’t have been done all that long ago. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that when an almost impossible to find spring needed replacing on a cheap runabout, they didn’t go the extra mile and order a pair and spend more than the car was worth on labour for both sides.

I won’t send the other spring back yet; there’s a not insignificant chance that the springs are mismatched since one is Rodius and one is Rexton. If that’s the case, then it’ll have to come apart again, either to fit a Rodius spring to the side I’ve just done, or to fit the Rexton spring to match the other side. But I won’t know that until I can get it back down on its wheels and ideally drive it around to settle everything in.

I could make a start on the brakes, but I have to fix a bolt I broke in the hub that holds the ABS sensor and source a suitable CV boot. At this point, it’ll likely be a generic stretch fit since I don’t want to remove the knuckle from the end of the shaft and disturb something that is functioning perfectly fine. That’ll be in another episode on the channel, but in the meantime, you can watch me struggle in the second episode of Saving the Ssangyong for your entertainment.

While I was hunting down the brake rotors, I found out the Rodius is a 5×130 fitment, which happens to be the same as the car we’re building. With the front in the air, it’d be rude not to throw on the 18” wheels for a laugh!

Alas, the centre bore is much bigger on the Rodius, so they’re just propped on a brick. But that means I have to deliver the disappointing news to what must be a fairly niche group of enthusiasts who stable both Ssangyong and Porsche. Sadly, no, you can’t just swap wheels if you need to in a pinch. Sorry.

All photos by the author unless noted.

Top graphic images: Adrian Gordon