Spent yesterday afternoon working on the PV.

Plan was to fix the known problem , the last remaining sway bar mount that hadn't been ripped out from a combination of the nice stout IPD sways (front and rear) and (obviously, in this case a more dominant factor) rust.

Sway bar mount that isn't:


So when I jacked it up to work on it, I looked over the control arms. And oh dear. That one's cracked. Again (I welded up cracks on them a few years ago). And, well, the other one's cracked as well.

Hit with a wire wheel, and showing some of my older welding still on it.


Other side, bending downward some.


Decided it wasn't worth the effort of taking them off, so I just tensioned the cracks shut with a jack stand and zapped at it (amateurishly) with the MIG.


Blasted a little paint on it.

The other side too...


Then (finally) on to the one thing I'd set off to do, replacing the missing sway bar mount. A fairly thick piece of steel, with two large holes drilled in it. Nuts welded to the back side. The rusty sheet metal is trimmed and holes drilled for clearance around the welded on blind nuts on the other side. Then it is (again, amateurishly) MIG'ged onto the remaining solid metal. And blasted with a little paint.


The welding is blobbier than my normal bubble gum because I find it difficult to get a nice bead working upside down. And the sheet metal I'm welding onto is fairly thing, seems to respond better to a bunch of little pooled sticks instead of a long seam. Ugly, but it seems to hold together OK. I did a similar hack fix on the other side years ago and it looks no better and has stuck together.

I shouldn't have ever bought a salt belt old car. It tricked me with the pretty and rust free outer sheet metal, but it hid all the horrors underneath. It's been a close race at times between rust and me and the MIG. Sooner or later something important might fall off (like, say, the rear axle) and I'll end up getting a nice rust free(ish) body from out west somewhere. Like I should have done originally.

I'm starting to think that the cracks are probably caused by the arm getting twisted around as you drive. Probably in either of these two situations:
1) Around corners, when the nice stiff IPD bar is pushing and pulling on that mount that sticks forward from the front arm member. This will twist it, could lead to those cracks. And the way the cracks always show up on the front welded edge and not on the back bolted edge seems to indicate that something funny is happening on the front and not the back - the sway bar...
2) Another possibility is twisting forces applied to the arm under hard braking. I'll admit I thrash my PV pretty decently, it's got wider tires and 122 discs up front and I'll occasionally work the brakes pretty hard.

But yeah, if you have a PV, not a bad idea to take a peak at those spring perches every once in a while.
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'63 PV544 rat rod, '93 Classic #1141 245 +t