1966 Austin Healey 3000
This Austin Healey 3000 came in to the shop with a severe suspension problem on the right-hand front corner. Once we removed the wheel we discovered that the shock had torn away a portion of the mounting plate welded to the chassis.
Our first step was to assess the damage and decide exactly how much of the plate needed to be replaced. We could've replaced the entire plate, but making sure the suspension geometry was not affected by the repairs can prove a difficult and expensive task.
Because portions of the plate and some of the mounting weld nuts were undamaged we decided to section in a portion of a new repair piece to keep the suspension alignment intact as much as possible.
First we built a jig based on the new repair piece to ensure that all the bolt holes would line up correctly. We also test-fit this jig to the remaining bolt holes on the original mounting plate to make sure everything was correct. After verifying that everything would fit we created a template of the area to be repaired and laid it out on our repair piece. After carefully marking the lines to cut we used a die grinder to trim the piece.
After using our template to cut out the damaged section of the original shock mount we used our jig to mount the repair section to the shock mount. As you can see, we cut some notches in the jig to allow us to easily tack the repair piece in place.
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