With a bit of time on his hands Jon decided to get on with some productive re-build work!

After having a lovely time down in Cornwall (even if it did snow on two days) I decided to cut the holiday short to get on with the front end of the Beetle.
As you may have read in a previous post I now have my narrowed beam, leaves and track rods back from The Bus Station, so I was good to go and time is ticking so it was no good sitting around down in the West Country when there's work to be done!

I got back on Thursday morning and got right to it!
That's when I hit the first stumbling block! After swiftly bolting up the beam with no problems I then spent most of the day trying to fit the urethane bushes!
They needed a lot of persuasion to fit in the holes. Apparently this is common when using urethane bushes! I then had trouble getting the trailing arms in! This took me through pretty much all of Friday too but about an hour before the light faded I succeeded and quickly fitted my King and Links ready for the brakes to go on the next day!

I have to say the CSP front brake system is engineering at its best. It is all very good quality and very well thought out! Plus it was so easy to fit a 10 year old could have done it!
All I have to do on the brakes now is find some shorter hoses (thanks to the 4-inch narrowed beam) and then bleed the system.
I even had plenty of time left to bolt on the steering box, track rods (complete with new ends), and the steering damper. It almost felt rude not to put the wheels on too so I got them out of the garage and whipped them on!

Sadly Sunday was spent trying to work out the best move regarding shocks as the normal King and Link fronts don't want to fit. This is because the beam is designed for use with a rose joint (or you can ask Mark to fit a bracket so you can use ball joint shocks). So after a few questions on the Restowagen forum I discovered that rear Mini shocks are the best way to go!

These, together with my rose joints are now on their way via eBay. I will post up photos of how they fit once I have got it all on the car.

Thanks to 58Vert and Shamrockez from Restowagen for your help and photos of shock setups on narrowed beams! It helped a lot!