Did a little more on the 16v today. Having managed to knock out another 1000 words of course assignment and done some research reading for it on 'Pedagogical Content Knowledge', I became a little distressed and needed a mechanical fix

Front suspension has lowered springs, and every time the car goes over a bump, there is a squeaking/rubbing noise from the NS front. Spoke with Alex and he thought that on occasion, some of the lowering kits cause the spring to just rub the turret, so goal was to get the strut off and see what was going on with a view to solving it.

Strut off is very easy - wheel of, pop the track rod end, remove the 4 bolts holding the strut to the bearing carrier, remove the 4 nuts holding the strut on at the turret. 4 nuts - wait, only 3. 16v strut tops were meant to have 4, so looks like the strut tops or the engine has been changed in the past. That would explain the insurance confusion. Chris Knott had the car as a 1.7 i.e. but the common compare websites have it as a 16v - oh well.

Of course, not as straight forward as it should be. Very bottom of the 4 bolts was turning but not coming out. Turns out the thread in the bearing carrier is stripped. A nut has been put on the back to secure it, but the alloy spacer in the strut has broken and the bolt has seized in the alloy (the discovery of anti-seize paste was a wonderful thing for me). Beat this out, and wondered about longer bolts with nuts, or taking the bearing carrier and hub off and replacing with a spare I have.

Anyone, onto the strut, and the rubbing is immediately obvious. When the spring compresses, the first top most free coil is moving upwards and rubbing the edge of the top mount. It has been doing it for a while as the spring is quite marked.

Looking at the logistics of this, the top of the spring sits in a rubber moulding, which sits in the strut top which is shaped so that end of the spring is against a stop (should have photo-ed it I guess). It looks like the spring is not hard enough against the stop because of the rubber, as if the whole spring was turned a further 10 or 15 degrees to be hard up against the stop, the first free coil would miss the edge of the strut top by a good few mm. Not able to do this, the simple solution is a gentle application of the angle grinder to remove the offending strut top edge. That seems to have solved the problem from a bouncing up and down perspective, and the drive to work tomorrow will confirm it has been successful.

On re-assembly, managed to strip the top thread into the bearing carrier. So temporarily have 2 longer bolts (155 bottom wishbone bolts do the job nicely) with nuts to hold the thing tight, but will replace the bearing carrier and pop new front bearings in while I am at it.

Front disc on that side is - now what is that term... cattle trucked. Caliper is fine and pads look like they have overheated. I pulled the caliper off and popped on one of the Vectra front calipers I have. Perfect fit directly over the tiny disc, and the wheel fits nicely over it. Will be ordering a pair of 155 V6 front discs shortly, and as soon as I get the brake hoses made up, will do the big brake conversion.

Whilst this was all in bits, had a chance to inspect the front NS for rust. Jacking point is good, but all the protection is falling off and a bit of surface rust, so plenty of work to do de-rusting and re-protecting towards the end of the summer. All round the engine compartment looks good, so not bad all in all.

Will do some pics next time, as next piece of work likely to be the big brake thing.

managed to find a set of late rear discs/calipers etc, so at some point, the rear drums will come off as well.