The last phase of the shock installation

Now that I’m happy with my front shocks I can finally move on and mount them properly

Rear Mini shock mounted to a Beetle narrowed beam using an M10 rose joint with M10x1.25 female thread.

You may well have thought my shock absorber work was finished, if you read my last post, but suffice to say there was one more phase left and that was to make up a proper mount for shock to bolt to the tower.
Now this could be as easy as putting a bolt through the rose joint and shock tower and putting a nut on the other side and tightening it all up but I wasn’t really happy to do that.
You see, the hole in the shock tower was, quite rightly, made to the same size as that on the original tower so in theory the original bolt could be used. However, try as I might I couldn’t find a rose joint to suit. The biggest bearing hole on the joint I could find was M10 so I’ve had to use an M10 bolt. This of course meant there was play in the shock tower hole as an M10 is smaller than the original.
The best way forward was to weld an M10 nut to either side of the tower. I could have just used the one nut but I felt two would be stronger. Plus having the nut welded on will make it much easier getting the shock on and off once the body is on.
Once happy with the welds holding the nuts on I cut down the bolt to the correct length to minimise tower to body clearance as much as possible and then bolted the shock in place.
Job done! The shock is now mounted and feels strong plus there is plenty of clearance between the shock and trailing arms as well as the steering arm (both of which were why I had to change the shocks over in the first place).

These are the nuts I used to weld to the tower. Note that I chamfered the edges to ensure a good penetrative weld

Here is one of the nuts welded to the inside of the shock tower.

After a lick of paint it doesn’t look too bad. This shot shows the clearence between the Mini shock and the trailing arm

And finally here is the nut on the inside of the tower. Sadly, as you can see, my discs are already starting to rust – luckily it will clean off once I get the car on the road!