gold RC10 rear swaybar howto w/ pics

[nerius]

The story of Matt Oliver’s RC10. Matt acquired an A-stamp Cadillac RC10 some years ago for about twenty five dollars. Being visually impaired and not having the experience of putting together and fixing RC10 cars like some of us older folk Matt didn’t do much with it. It sat on his shelf for a long time. The car was just a bare chassis with no electronics and no body or wing. When I first saw it recently it seemed to be mostly complete mechanically but was misconfigured in several obvious ways. The important pieces of the car were intact and were in great shape. Because I was a whiz with these cars in my youth I decided to take on this restoration project for my friend Matt. I grew up just around the corner from the Ranch Pit Shop in Del Mar, site of the first-ever off-road world championship in 1985.

In starting to take the car completely apart it became clear to me that the car was never assembled correctly and was barely driven. The car never had the chance to be a truly awesome RC10. It was also clear to me that the car had had at least one major crash that resulted in a broken ball stud being lodged in the rear bulkhead, in the optimal corner hole. (I have since managed to get that threaded remnant of hardened steel out without damaging the bulkhead in a significant way, by using a conical carbide Dremel grinding bit and a 3/64” HSS drill bit.) This was indeed the most poorly configured RC10 that I had ever worked on. There were details everywhere on the car that rubbed me the wrong way. For example, all four shock shafts had deep markings from being forcefully held by wire cutters on the sliding surface, relatively far away from the threaded end, to the point where it prevented smooth operation of the shocks. I have built and fixed several RC10s for friends and neighbors and this car tops the list of most poorly-configured. I also saw that it had great potential. For example, the underside of the chassis was barely scathed. I would compare the car I started with with a terribly mangled beautiful woman. It deserved to be configured correctly and had never been in such a state.

Well Matt’s RC10 has reached a state of near mechanical perfection.

(Continued in next post.)