This week I went out and bought the best hydraulic press I could afford, the quality seems pretty good for the money and I'm sure it will be good enough for what I need. The only thing I don't like about it is that its a bit short and I have to crouch down to use it. I can easily build a little platform for it though to bring it up to a more comfortable height.
Today I spent most of the morning building a tool out of scrap metal that would allow me to squish my control arm tubes in a reproducible way.
It has some solid round bar in the base so I know when to stop pressing and a bit of angle at the back to keep the depth consistent.
You can see my first pressing to the left in this photo. I am still using my TIG to heat the metal but at about half the amps of my first attempt so I can control the heat easily.
No its not made from solid gold
So then it was time to move everything into position and start making the front upper control arms. I am keeping the rod ends parallel to each other so when I make adjustments to the length for either camber or caster there is no spreading effect.
The string lines give me the angle for my tube notcher, I prepared all the tube for both sides as they will be the same. The squished end is where they will differ from each other.
At this point I ran out of time, hopefully next weekend I will complete these upper arms.