Aspire beam differences?

[oxbrain]

So I busted the new bushing while trying to install it. Instead of ordering a new one and putting the work on hold for another week I went to the junkyard and got ANOTHER aspire beam. I now have 3 aspire rear beams. One has the shocks firmly attached due to broken bolts, one is fine and needs bushings, and one that is fine.

Looking at them side by side I noticed something funny.


On the beam without this tab, the hardline is routed to the tab for the handbrake cable. Both beams have this hole for the hardline to meet up with the hose. The new beam just has a second tab for the hardline. Will this make any difference? I'm probably going to just use the handbrake tab and grind this one off.

Also, there is a tab where the beam attaches to the chassis. The festiva beam has a much smaller tab. What are these for, will they interfere, and does it matter that one is bent a little? If they are not needed I think I'm going to grind them off.

[mechanicaldj]

the Aspire your new beam came off of

most likely had antilock brakes

[Silv3rBull3t]

You can grind those tabs around the bushings off..

[oxbrain]

Cool. My dad is coming over tommorow with his grinder.

I am going to reuse the festiva rear brake hoses. I checked and the flarenuts go right in. No leaks right now, but I don't know about when the system is under a lot of pressure.

I'm going to have to go to the junkyard again tommorow to get another hardline for the rear right. I am getting a lot of these flarenuts stripping, about 1 in 3.

[Safety Guy]

A special ABS prepped axle makes sense to me. I've never seen that type of rear axle and never noted any ABS Aspires.

Interesting!

For what it's worth, I ruined one Aspire rear axle too. I kept cranking on the bottom shock bolt and actually pushed the internal thread part into the axle trailing arm so far it became useless. What a waste.

Karl

[Rumnhammer]

answers

The Aspire beam is not ruined, if the threads brake off, you can get a mig head in there to spot weld them in back in place, In fact this will make them better then before, because they are very sparsely spot welded from the factory, you can add additional spot welds to strengthen them if they haven't already broken off that is what I did.

The rear tabs are to prevent the beam from hanging down 90degrees when the rear shocks are removed, they hit the bottom of the car and only let the beam droop so far. They are larger on the Aspire beam then on the festy one, I ground mine down to the same size as the festy was, but did leave them.
Chris Rummel

[houseofreggae]

Re: answers

...or you could make a fourth trip to the jy and grab those arm body mounts you forgot and skip the grinding all together!!!

[oxbrain]

I just ground the tabs lower. They are now about the length of the festiva ones.

I'm using a wierd mix of festiva and aspire brake hoses. The festiva ones are too big to fit nicely in the aspire brackets on the beam, and the aspire ones spin on the holes for the festiva lines. Ideally I need hoses with one festiva end and one aspire end. Until that magic happens I'm just using zip ties to keep the lines held down.

I've stripped so many stupid flare nuts. I think they make these things out of butter.