the old guard rubbing chestnut.....
you could always space out the sway bar a bit and give yourself less caster if you don't want to massage the guard.
 

yeah Gazz i was looking at that earlier today, and thinking exactly that. 

The tyres on the 13s are 23-25mm oversized. if they were correct that would've saved me from having to massage them. however to fit the 15s on, i was planning to roll the front and rear guards as a preventative measure. the rears shouldn't scrub with 15s on, but the fronts they most likely will. so the guard rolling would be a preventative measure. 

wow I'm way behind with updates on this. 
 
so much has happened since i last updated. in short, she is now registered :D :D :D 
 
ok i better post some progress photos to fill you all in :P 

So the next piece of the puzzle after rebuilding the front end was it failing RWC due to sill damage under the car :( 
 
$600 later to a mate of mine who is an old school panel beater, and it was sorted. 
so you can see the factory jacking point in the background where the rubber bung is. the sill should be level across there, with the half moon cut out lining up wiht the factory jacking hole in the chassis. 
 
the road worthy guy reckons its pushed the floor up, on the other side of the sill, between the sill and chassis. this is not the case, the floor naturally rises behind there anyway, but he is convinced this damaged has caused the floor to go up. 
 

Rod came round and got started on the sill repairs. He got the body pulled down pretty close to right, but it wasnt until later in the day we realised how bad the seams where, further in. So, the car is going on a bit of a holiday to Rod's workshop in a couple weeks to have all the repairs done. We discovered a little bit of rust around the damaged sills, so that'll all get cleaned up properly. 
 

 

 
one bent sill trim to be straightened. 
 

 
passenger side before...
 

 
passenger side after
 

 

 
Driver's side after...
 

 
 
This is where we left it, because we soon after realised the problem area was further in. 
 
These seams are what we are concerned about. 
 

 

 
for reference, this is what the seams are supposed to look like. This is a mate's Mk1 4 door. so the seams should be flat, or parallel with the body line of the sills, or close to. 
 

 
 

These next few photos are from my panel beater and a thread he has running on another forum I'm apart of. 

We moved the XB coupe to another workshop for him, so he could fit the escort in :) 

So it could go for a ride and this could take its place

**from Rod's thread**


The misalignment of the sill on this side was most likely always like this from factory, it has green on the face that should be covered and the spot welds hadn't been tampered with.

If you track the bottom edge of the seam there you can see it's now essentially straight. I trimmed the excess away so it looks more correct. 

On the other side, I had to work a lot harder to get the seam to come down but got there in the end. Also had to add some metal back to the edge of the outer skin with weld to create a straighter line.

This was all filled up and smoothed out. Then primed and painted up in flat black, trims reinstalled. 

Did the top lip in flat black too because of some surface rust and paint chips on the edge.

Other side

 

now, after getting all this sorted, the guy who was doing my RWC decided to go away on holidays until the 12th of december...yet another setback. had to wait 3 weeks then for him to come back and finish the test for me