There has been work, on and off between fitting a new bathroom and trying to get the house ready for a move, oh and plan a holiday. Anyhow..

Since the last update I’ve disassembled the rear half shafts*, fully assembled the front near-side hub and fitted a temporary brake disc and wheel and drilled one rear hub carrier for the third mounting bolt and installed some temporary shims to begin the rear-end setup..

 

*When I say “I” what I mean is, with the help of my Dad. In fact, he did the second half shaft while I was at work one day just because he felt like a change of pace.. which was handy!

All the instructions I could find on the Internet and in the Haynes manual described disassembly as follows:

Using a suitable socket just smaller than the bearing cup on the lower side and a tube just larger than the bearing cup on the upper side, drive the half shaft down so that the bearing cup is exposed.

Now grasp the bearing cup with mole grips and wiggle it free of the half shaft.

Turn over and repeat.

 

That’s all great in theory but what I found was that the bearing cups were so tight in their bores that there isn’t a big enough pair of grips in the world.

On the advice of a fellow forum member we welded a long M10 bolt to the bearing cup and used that plus a large socket to draw the cup out of the half shaft loops – that works very easily once you have the welder set up so you’re not either blowing through the cup or welding it so poorly that the bolt snaps free of the weld!

Voila:

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And there you can see the mess of bolts and sockets etc that we ended up using. Now time to clean the half shafts up and assemble them to the other half (with the splines cut for the Dax CV joint).

 

As well as that we now have a one-wheeled car! It would have been two but when trying to assemble the second front hub I managed to muller the grease seal when trying to push it on to the mating flange. Two new seals on order (in case I bugger it up again!) and then I’ll get the second hub on.

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One rear hub is now fully fitted (temporarily, of course, as the toe and alignment is yet to be set), too, complete with the third mounting hole drilled out:

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The eagle-eyed among you will spot that I have rather a lot of what is known as positive-camber at the front right now. That clearly needs setting up properly with the upper ball joint moving inward. I’m a little concerned that there is so much camber I won’t be able to reach the correct setting of 0º 45′ negative, though!

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