Anchor Point Iron – Classic Car Restorations and Customizations

Some of you remember the exhaust system that was welded directly to the frame. I asked then, who does this. I now have a second entry for the series, and this one was not lazy. This one was dangerous.

While cleaning up the front suspension parts coming off the car, I got a good look at the passenger side lower control arm, which is where the bottom of the shock absorber bolts in on GM A-Body cars. Two bolts hold the shock to the arm.

One of the bolts was missing. Not broken. Missing. Gone, nut and all, like it was never there.

The other one was still attached to the shock, technically. It just was not attached to the arm anymore, because at some point, with the shock hanging on by one fastener and flexing in a way it was never designed to, that last bolt ripped clean through the stamped steel of the arm. Tore it open like a pull tab. The metal did not rust through. It was torn through, by load, over time.

Which means for some unknown stretch of this car’s life, the passenger front shock absorber was decoration. Bolted to nothing. Along for the ride.

What that actually feels like

Here is the part worth understanding, because a missing shock is not like a missing radio knob. The spring holds the car up. The shock is what makes the spring behave. Take the shock away and the spring does what springs do, which is bounce, and keep bouncing, with nothing to say stop.

So picture driving this Cutlass down a Maryland back road. The front tire hits a pothole. Instead of one thump and done, that corner of the car turns into Tigger. Because that is what an undamped spring is. It is a Tigger. Bouncing is what it does best, bouncing is the only thing it knows, and it will keep right on bouncing until friction gets tired of watching. Boing, boing, boing, four or five cycles before it settles, and by then you have hit the next bump and the whole act starts over. The nose floats and wallows through dips like a boat taking swells. Get on the brakes hard and that corner dives, rebounds, dives again, while the tire hops instead of gripping, which is a genuinely bad thing to have happening at the exact moment you are trying to stop.

On a washboard surface or a mid corner bump it gets worse. An undamped wheel does not stay planted. It skips. And a front tire that is in the air, even a quarter inch, even for a tenth of a second at a time, is a tire that is not steering. The car wanders, darts on bumps, and asks for little corrections constantly. The tire itself keeps a diary of all this in the form of cupped, scalloped wear patches from slapping the pavement a thousand times a mile.

Whoever drove this car in that condition probably just thought old cars ride rough. No. Old cars ride like old cars. This car rode like a paint shaker with a Tigger in the right front corner, and every mile of it was chewing that arm open a little wider.

The silver lining, and the build list

Here is the good news. That shock was already coming off this car forever. The front end plan already included coilovers and tubular upper arms, and the original plan was to clean up the stock stamped lower arms, press in fresh bushings, and run them.

Not anymore. Look at that torn mount and tell me you would trust its twin brother from the driver side, already sitting on the shelf. Stamped steel arms that spent fifty seven years getting worked, one of them hard enough to tear, are done earning trust with me. New tubular lower control arms just went on the build list, both sides, to match the tubular uppers. The whole front corner will be new, boxed, and stronger than anything Lansing ever bolted under an A body.

Who does this. Somebody did. And the Cutlass carried it anyway.