Fiero Projects

Tools for my fiero

In the course of working on my fiero I have had to make several tools. I had to make a ball joint seperator tool and a set of blocks for doing the toe part of alignments.

    Balljoint seperator

It is a real pain to remove the balljoints on the front of an older fiero, especially if they have not been removed in a long time. In order to accomplish this needed to make a tool. I took a small section of metal tube, two hex bolts, and two nuts. I put them together like this:
   
As you can see from the pictures I put the two bolts into the metal tube with both nuts on the same bolt. To use the tool, I put each ball joint end into a hex bolt, and turn the nuts apart. I had to drill out one of the bolt heads to fit the larger lower balljoint. But this tool works very well.

    Toe adjustment blocks

After doing many different things to my fiero I have needed to do alignments (changing balljoints, polybushings ). I have done string alignments, but they are difficult to setup and measure. I saw pictures on the internet of other people's similar block, and thought they would be easier to use, so I decided to make set.

I setup the string alignment and measured the inset of the front wheels vs the rear wheels. On my car with the GA brakes front and rear, the front had a 1/8 inch inset per side. I made 4 blocks from spare 2x4 I had laying around. As you can see from the pictures they are not very complicated to use. Just bolt them to the wheels and run a string between the nails. Then turn the tierods to adjust until satisfied. Drive and repeat.

As you can see from the picture along the string (far left) I have marks for each 1/8 inch toe setting on the blocks.







Close ups of the blocks.