420 Rear Suspension Assembly – removal and refitting.

[BookerME]

I’ve just spent a very long day removing the IRS unit from my 420. The 6 nuts and 4 bolts holding the rear mounting rubbers to the cross beam took me most of the day to get off, destroying nearly all of them in the process as ferrous oxide had taken its toll.

It occurred to me that when I come to re-fit it all, could I just put the bolts that hold the rear mounting rubbers to the body frame facing inwards – i.e. with the bolts on the outside facing in and the nuts on the inside, as opposed to the bolts on the inside facing out with the nuts on the outside?

My thinking was if it ever had to come out again (hopefully not) I could simply undo the 8 nuts, withdraw the 8 bolts outwards and drop the unit out on the jack, thus avoiding having to remove the 6 nuts and 4 bolts holding the mounting rubbers to the cross beam? The rear bolts won’t come out while the Suspension Assembly is in place, there’s no room to slide them out as they’re blocked by cross beam.

Is there something I’m missing here? Is there some issue aligning the unit when remounting that requires the 6 nuts and 4 bolts to be fitted after the rear rubber has been bolted to the body frame?

The pictures below are the rear mounting rubbers. One has the nuts removed, one doesn’t.
I hope I’ve explained it all OK. Does anyone have any views or knowledge about this?

Cheers, Mac.

[BookerME]

Update.
The IRS is back in. The easiest option for me was to loosely bolt the brackets on the IRS unit itself, then jack that up into position so the 8 bolts would go through the brackets and chassis holes with the nuts on the inside.

On the rear brackets, there’s no choice anyway, the bolts face inwards as there’s no room to get them in facing outwards. It’s still a fiddly job to get the nuts on though, with very little room to work.

The bolts on the front brackets are much easier and it really makes no difference if they face inwards or outwards as it turns out, they’re easily accessible.

It took a few goes to line it all up and various levers to align all the holes on the brackets and chassis so the bolts went all the way through.

Once I’ve got the radius arms mounted, I’ll tighten all the nuts/bolts on all the brackets - three short bolts holding each bracket to the IRS unit and two long bolts holding the IRS to the chassis.