Now I have a deadline in sight (although I don’t have a definite date yet it looks like the car needs to be on it’s wheels before mid June at the latest) and a number of weeks taken up with the holiday of a lifetime driving Route 66, I’m putting as much time as I can into the car. Basically any time I’m not sleeping, eating or working!

 

So after another weekend of work the front end is buttoned up besides the hubs & dust covers (as I’m waiting on some small M6 cap head bolts to retain the dust covers) and the rear end is starting to very much resemble a car as well!

 

So.. what did I actually do?

 

First I dragged the diff out from where it was hiding in the corner of the garage and, although it was powder coated when it was rebuilt, it was showing some signs of surface rust so it was treated to a brisk rub down and a coat of Eastwood Rust Encapsulator followed by some Eastwood Chassis Black. Then I grabbed the lower differential bracket and offered it up. That was the moment I remembered a thread on the forums some time ago about there being two different diffs, one with a central pinion and one with an offset pinion, and that there were (naturally) two different brackets. See if you can spot the problem here:

 

So a quick call to Dax and the right bracket was on it’s way to me next-day with the wrong one collected back. I (re)fitted the bushes and bolted that to the diff after running a tap through the mounting holes (M10x1.25 on the front face and M12x1.25 on the underside) and fitted it to the car with the aid of a chain hoist, the garage roof truss and a willing assistant.

After that the A-frame was fitted pretty easily and the ball joint bolts thread-locked in place.

The trailing arms were bolted in at the chassis end (which took a little persuading with a podger as well as some bravery as I was worried about cross-threading the captive nuts in the chassis and finally the rear shock absorbers.

 

The De Dion beam was fitted next basically per the manual instructions with the aid of the chain hoist again; basically it was hung from the rear shocks and then we wound the spring platforms up until the spherical bushes in the beam could be aligned with the A-frame holes and bolts passed through and then lastly the rear arms were bolted to the beam and we had a fully located rear end.

 

I set about installing the first of the rear hub carriers after drawing the steel bushes into the carrier and onto the brand new pivot tube with the aid of a long threaded bar, washers and nuts, and at that point I realised a slight mistake..

 

Everything looks fine here, right?

Except that the lower front-most mount for the diff carrier needs a hole drilling in the carrier in a blank area (top right in the picture below) and my carriers came pre-assembled with bearings, back-plates and hubs from Wards which means access is .. almost non-existent.

 

Luckily the hole is drilled from the back using the tube in the De Dion beam as a guide (read the instructions properly, Aaron!) .. unfortunately that means dismantling the trailing arms from the beam which I’d literally just finished torquing up.

 

Anyway, it’s almost at the point that the driveshaft ends can go in and at least at that point wheels can go on and it’ll roll around!

Of course I am struggling a little to get the driveshafts apart right now, so that might be next weekends project.