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Honda Fit GD3, WOF Fixes

Now it was time to address the issues with the car that I knew about, the WOF failures.

The previous owner had taken it for a WOF inspection and it failed on two things; A bald front LH tyre and the front lower control arm bushes being perished. Both were easy fixes in the big scheme of things, so I wasn’t too worried.

My plan for the tyres was to buy a set of used standard alloys with good tyres on them, as it didn’t make sense to me to put new tyres on the ugly steelies. So when a friend had a set of standard Sport alloys listed on Facebook, I jumped on them.

Regarding the front lower arms, Honda only sells them as complete arms, but you can get aftermarket bushes separately. I considered that for a little bit, and then found that Whiteline makes complete replacement arms with poly bushes already fitted, and they were on sale, so I grabbed a pair of them. This means I also get a pair of nice new ball joints on the arms.

I lifted the car up on my Quickjacks and removed the wheels. This allowed me to check the lower arm bushes for myself. Initially, they didn’t look too bad, but then I noticed the rubber split away from the center tube

Removing the arms wasn’t too bad. A bolt through each of the bushes, and then splitting the ball joint. The stock ball joint had this nifty little clip on the castle nut, instead of a normal split pin.

With the old arm out, all that was left to do was fit the new one. This is where I remembered that fitting polybushed lower arms suuuucks. There is very little play in the rear bush, so trying to get everything aligned and the bolt through the bush was a real pain in the backside. The Whiteline arms also require metal spacers on either side of the bush, so that added another level of things to keep aligned.

After lots of wiggling and jiggling, jacking the hub up and down to change the angle of the arm, and a screwdriver through the hole to line everything up, I eventually got all the bolts in and the arm was fitted. Remember to jack the arm up to normal ride height before torquing up the bolts so the bushes don’t get damaged.

Happy that both front arms were now in place, I moved onto the rear wheel bearing. I had noticed this was noisy when I was driving the car home after buying it, and recognised the noise as the same one the Jazz was making before I replaced the rear bearing in that too.

I had jacked the rear of the car up earlier and identified that it was the RH rear wheel bearing that was rumbling. How this wasn’t picked up in the WOF check, I don’t know.

The drum and old bearing came off easy enough. A rattle gun on the center nut makes quick work of it, even with the stake to stop it from coming loose.

Just like the one on the Jazz, the inner bearing was fine, but the outer bearing felt like it had no grease in it and was horrible to spin, very crunchy.

The new bearing slides onto the stub axle, and is secured in place with the nut. It’s one of the easiest bearings I have replaced, taking only a matter of minutes to do.

With the nut staked in place, the drum is then refitted. Don’t forget to refit the dust cap too.

After all that work, the final thing to do was fit the alloys. Being standard GD Fit/Jazz wheels these fit straight on and I reused the nuts from the alloys.

Because I had disturbed the suspension, and the tyres were heavily worn on the shoulders when I got the car, I knew the alignment would be out. To finish the job I had the alignment checked and sure enough, across the fronts I had over 23mm of toe out. It’s now set at the required 0mm. I’m not sure how much of that was me replacing the arms and how much of that was it being overdue and ignored by the previous owner.

The car already looks significantly better and should be ready for its WOF check now. It’s booked in for this week, so hopefully I’ll soon be able to take it for a decent run.

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