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A cheap press work perfectly fine and ends up getting used on all sorts of stuff. I think mine was less than $200 on sale from supercheap
I’d tried hitting a few bits with hammers and while generally fine, there were casualties which end up costing time and money. The gentle pressing in of bearings on a press is very satisfying.
Thanks Cadas. I have a press, now that you've brought my mind back to it, I reckon I can make it work, thanks for making me think it through again.
I did eventually manage to convince myself to do some painting last night. It did involve an 8:15 pm Bunnings run when I couldn't find the paintbrush I bought for the task several months back. There will be another batch of parts which need to be painted, but first I must prep them.
I'm not 100% happy with the finish, I think I've laid it on a bit thin in places (but if it's too thick it bubbles, so it could be worse), and this product doesn't like being re-coated, so it is what it is. At the end of the day, they're axles, are they really supposed to be shiny?
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Cheers,
Martin
There's been poor progress during evenings this week, mostly because work has been a bit interesting. So that means I haven't finished cleaning up and painting the rest of the bits and pieces which need to be painted. I did, however, find the head space to finally pore over parts manuals to figure out which bolts I needed to buy in to build up the axles. I had hoped to buy a full restoration bolt kit, but I'm having trouble getting through to my selected supplier, and the show must go on.
Today was set aside for a job I had hoped I'd be able to ignore and never ever have to do - replace the steering relay. My previous attitude was head in the sand, she'll be right mate. However, about a month ago I put multigrips on the end of the relay and gave it a turn. With a tiny movement, any hopes I had of it being OK were dashed, it sounded like it was full of grit. I decided to buy a new one, as time is running out and I don't need to muck around with pulling one down, determining what I need to buy, waiting for bits to arrive, and reassembling it. Which brings us back to today, relay day.
I enlisted Ben's assistance, and together we embarked.
It's probably worth mentioning at this point that my chassis is on a 'rotisserie' (75 mm galvanised pipe poked through the serendipitous hole in the chassis), so we're working with the chassis upside down. The bottom of the chassis is at the top of the photos.
Pulling the bottom retainer plate off (50% of the bolts sheared off, not a good sign), it was everything I was dreading.
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Hitting the bottom of the relay with a 4 lb mallet, we began to see nothing apparent happening at the top. But it was happening at the bottom, we were unintentionally removing the relay shaft. This wasn't a big drama (if you pretend there isn't a spring inside), the noise I previously described had me convinced there was no hope for this relay. Once we noticed this was happening, we tied a piece of foam around the bottom of the chassis to catch anything exciting, and dressed up in even more safety gear.
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I'm pleased to report it was all pretty boring. The bottom plate broke off, but the spring didn't manage to eject anything, and was actually stuck partly compressed on the shaft even after it had been removed from the housing. Using a Dremel, we cut the spring in a few spots to fully remove any residual tension. I've read these are supposed to be lubricated with oil. I've also read grease doesn't really do much good. There wasn't any evidence that either grease or oil had ever been in the relay, it was bone dry and rusty. I had expected it to be full of blasting media, but it was just full of rust.
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Back to the relay housing, we continued work with the 4 lb mallet. Is that progress I see?
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Indeed it is!
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With only a little more bashing it fell out!
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Unsurprisingly, there's some repair work to be done. Does anybody know what the inner diameter of the tube is supposed to be?
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All that in time for lunch, much faster than expected.
With our afternoon, we re-tackled the seized track rod end we've been working on for a week. A vice, and myself with a pipe wrench resisted rotation, while Ben threw his entire body weight behind a large set of multigrips. With much effort, finally it came free. Remarkably, the thread looks to be in great condition, so reusing that track rod is looking good.
With that out of the way, we have begun removing the old bushes from the chassis. We've been able to remove all of the centre tubes and rubber, but I have 3 outer shells to remove during the week. Oddly, there seems to be one spot where the bush had already fallen out. The remaining ones are pretty knackered, so this isn't even surprising.
Overall, it's been a great day, achieving much more than I'd expected, more easily than I'd expected. We'll call that a win.
Cheers,
Martin
Swing and a miss...Quote:
Originally Posted by turkeybrain
Everything* is painted, ready for reassembly.
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*If you ignore the brake backing plates I painted 10 years which may have gone rusty while in storage, and I'm avoiding looking at because of... reasons? Then there's the bit where I painted the steering lever which had 1/2" UNC bolts through it. Sigh.
Reassembly has begun. It has not gone smoothly. It's my own fault really. I say some silly things, and my project manager likes to remind me. This is written on the project whiteboard in the shed:
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So far I've successfully installed 8 studs, and 1 oil seal.
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I've learned a lot this year. Like how not to install oil seals. The first went well, the second went less well. New ones are on order. Sigh.
I had organised to buy a replacement stub axle on Tuesday this week from a guy down south when I was practically driving past his front door (about 4 hours away from my place), but alas we got the 'rona, cut plans short and headed home a day early without stopping. Sigh. My father-in-law intends to pick the stub axle up in a few weeks.
My plans for this week involved landscaping the back yard. Instead, there's been a whole lot of not much going on, which does mean there will be a job debt to be paid later, the back yard has not landscaped itself.
It's not all doom and gloom though. Even though I've missed my self imposed deadline this year, I've made clear progress, something which has been lacking for a long time. The plan for next year is to build on that momentum. I'm not really sure it's possible, but I'd really love to take Serenity camping next Christmas. That's the goal, I've said it out loud (well, written it down, close enough). But it is, without a doubt, a massive stretch.
Cheers,
Martin
I'm back on my feet again, and have continued working on Serenity.
I have located the brake backing plates which I had previously sandblasted and painted. Alas, they are rusty. Not very rusty, but I'm struggling to justify installing rusty parts on my new restoration, so that needed to be fixed.
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After quite a few hours swinging off the back of a sandblasting cabinet over about 3 days, they are all rust-free, ready for repainting. Sandblasting was more painful than it should have been, my compressor has been getting sad and loud over the past year. It all came to a head when it started popping its overload protection while blasting. Turns out the bolt holding the pulley onto the compressor shaft had come loose, so was an easy fix. It's much quieter now, my wife was wondering why she could no longer hear it inside the house. It still wasn't initially playing nicely after tightening the nut, but letting it thoroughly cool overnight solved that and it's back up and running at full tilt, ready for further mistreatment and neglect.
I should change its oil.
Speaking of oil, the replacement oil seal arrived, and I managed to install it on Tuesday night without trashing it this time. Turns out you can't just hit them with a hammer, it's important to have something stiff which sits over the whole diameter of the seal to spread the hits and keep things straight. I won't make that mistake again! (I probably will.) I now have a spare as I bought two even though I only had one left to install, I don't trust myself.
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As you can also see, I've remembered to fit the swivel seal and retainer, with an eye to putting a new ball on. It was a close run thing, but I did eventually remember I was also supposed to fit a bearing to the back of the ball before I offer it up to the axle housing. I did test fit the ball before I remembered the bearing. The angle between the opposing faces on the swivel ball make them a bit of a challenge to press in bearings. There were a couple of heart-in-mouth moments as the bearing went in crooked before I got the packing angle right and it went in really easily.
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Installing the ball onto the axle housing was more interesting than I wanted it to be. Turns out the reinforced axle housings have a thicker flange than standard, requiring 1/8" longer bolts. Guess who didn't know that and bought the standard 1-1/4" bolts? The good news is the longer 1-3/8" bolts are used on the rear axle to hold the brake backing plate onto the rear Salisbury axle, so I've robbed Peter to pay Paul. Replacements are on order, along with a couple of 1-1/2" ones for where the stop plate is located. 5 out of 6 will do for now.
The picture below is slightly misleading. You might think I'd put anti-seize on the bolts, given the proximity of the can. Or I might have used it to grease the flange faces. But no, we've gone with moly grease on the flange faces, and Loctite 242 on the Nylock nuts. I'm pretty confident I'm going to live to regret my belt-and-braces approach to fastener retention the moment the swivel seal begins leaking oil. However, I also don't want to see these part company with the vehicle for any reason while on the move... I plan to run oil rather than one shot grease in the swivel hubs, I've settled on running Penrite 80W-90 GL-5 in the axles, gearbox, and transfer case. Penrite claim it's safe for yellow metal, and they recommend it for each of those components in the the Series 1 and Series 3, but not the 2A... I'd have considered their Mild EP, which they recommend for the 2A, if anybody sold it in Tasmania.
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This evening's effort has involved painting everything I previously blasted, so I can begin installing the right hand side swivel ball tomorrow night. Then it will be on to setting up the new swivel bearings, which sounds like a real hoot.
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Cheers,
Martin
Some sensible progress this week.
I finished assembling the second swivel ball. I did it twice because this time I forgot to fit the oil seal. I noticed before the Loctite set though, it could have been much worse.http://turkeybrain.com/gallery/Seren..._102802578.jpg
That was only the first of several blunders. The eagle eyed amongst you may have spotted I didn't fit the Railko or tapered roller bearing races to the ball. That made for some interesting work in the press, but we got there.http://turkeybrain.com/gallery/Seren..._083430306.jpg
Fitting the long side swivel hub.
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Setting the bearing pre-load is a fairly easy process, but it did take some time and a few attempts until it was sitting in the correct range. One side proceeded to tighten up overnight and had to be reset the following day. One is sitting at 14 lb, the other at 13 lb, so I'm pretty happy with that. For anybody wondering, thicker shims equates to less pre-load and therefore less torque required to turn the swivel hub.
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The next job is to replace the pinion seal on the Rover diff, which looks to be a relatively simple process. Replacement half shafts should be dropped off this afternoon, so I should be able to rebuild the UJ on the short side (I have previously rebuilt the long side) and install the diffs and half shafts, then begin building up the stub axle and wheel bearings.
Cheers,
Martin
Good to hear the latest progess. Interesting to read of the swivel pre-load changing overnight. Curious.
Keep forging ahead!
John
The changing preload has me a bit confused. Having reset it on Friday night, I checked it Monday night and it has drifted again. One side went from 14 lb to 15 lb (nothing much to worry about here), but the other side went from 13 lb to 21 lb.
I thoroughly lubricated the bearing and bush before the initial installation on Thursday night and didn't add extra oil during resetting on Friday night. I'm not sure whether this is enough of an issue to be worried about it. If it is, I don't really know how to fix it other than throwing a different set of new railko bushes at it.
Cheers,
Martin
This might be a silly question, but if you work the one which jumped from 13 to 21lbs back and forth by hand for a while, does the reading then come down closer to that obtained originally?
That's definitely not a silly question.
I had given it a couple of priming wiggles previously, that didn't seem to do much. I just went back out and gave it a whole heap (in excess of 20 cycles), it felt like it was loosening up a little as I did it. It dropped from low 20s to around 17-18 lb, which is an improvement, but still out of spec.
Might this be one of those things which will settle once it's mobile? I don't know.
Cheers,
Martin