Firsthand TAB experience

["Jim Reeve" <ultra@xxxx>]

While I have not had a trailing arm bolt actually break on me, I very 
well nearly did. I ignored a very obvious warning sign - a necessary 
steering correction under acceleration. What had happend is that the 
trailing arm bolt had stretched out or slightly bent, and I lost all 
of the alignment shims. This left a LOT of freeplay on the trailing 
arm itself, and ended up bending the bolt quite badly. Fortunately, 
my car was a bit smarter than me with this matter. It knew about this 
problem and it's solution to it was to seize up its own clutch to keep 
me from driving it. While I later determined the clutch problem to 
have been caused by the previous owner's jury-rigging, crawling under 
the car to fix it allowed me to notice the problem with the TAB. For 
the time being, I re-tighened both bolts and my car is now in winter 
storage. I need new trailing arm bolts, and Toby, you can add me to 
your list of interested parties.

Jim Reeve
MNDMC - Minnesota DeLorean Club
DMC-6960