Axles??

[Rick Fischer]

Sometimes I'm a bit slow but there you go. :(

Axles - My 80" has semi floaters. Discovered that there are also full floaters.

Guess these arrived around '55. ???

Question/s:

Will the full float axles go into the same carrier as the semi floats, or new diff carrier required? ...............and I've got the skinny springs.

What sort of "authentic" penalty is involved if one was to change to fully floating in the future. ??

(semi floats look to be "hard work" over the longer term, and I recently discovered that the people who removed the bearing keepers cut into one of the axles introducing stress raisers which I will now have to work and try and polish out. All pommy axles have never been renown for fatigue resistance.)

So. Just about ready to build up the front and rear axles and diffs. Just need to dti, and prussian blue the diffs; hopefully there will be no new surprises.

However, need to do a 40K B Service on the SVX first, (all the wheel bearings and and all fluids).

Cheers for now

Rick F

[JDNSW]

Fully floating axles became optional on the last of the Series 1 in 1957, and standard on all subsequent Series Landrovers. Converting from semifloating to full floating is simply a matter of fitting the full floating stub axles, hubs, drive flanges and half axles - all just bolts together. However, there is one "gotcha"!

Series 1 has a narrower track than Series 2/2a/3. This means the full floating half axles are shorter - and since they were an extra cost option for only a few months, they are about as common as hens teeth. The easy thing is to fit later half axles, with a spacer between the hub and the drive flange. This is easily made by turning the centre out of a spare drive flange, and is a fairly common modification. The ten spline fitting into the diff centre is the same on all Series axles.

The semifloating half axle is tougher than the fully floating one, and broken axles are quite rare. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the single row wheel bearing - and replacing them is a real pain.

Hope this helps

John

[Rick Fischer]

Thanks for that.

I'll keep the semi floaters for the time being. Hopefully, bearings manufactured using current steels and tech will be a bit more hardy than in the past................... and with luck as a restored Landie, while it might go off road, it won't be used as a tractor and carry all :)

Cheers

Rick F

[Lotz-A-Landies]

High Tough Engineering (formerly Maxidrive Axles) will make up halfshafts in the correct length for the Series 1 models, but they only do 24 spline outers, so you need to use SIII long wheelbase drive flanges or HTE series flanges.

You only need to donor the rear stub axles and any hubs from a SII/SIIa (or even S1 front axle). The original S1 brake backing plate will fit onto the SII/SIIa stub axle and it all bolts straight onto the standard axle housing.