Wire wheels fitted again

With the axle bolted back into place it should be a quick job to fit all the ancillaries and see how the wires fit.

It should be but it wasn’t.
I fitted the bearing pack and found it rubbed on the brake springs, they were fitted incorrectly and it took ages to work out how they should be fitted.

The hand brake linkages (shorter ones for wire wheels) took a while to fit as the felt washer’s refused to sit in the right place.

One prop shaft bolt wasn’t with the rest of the nuts and bolts ad took ages to find it - on the other side of the garage!

Other than that the job was fairly easy and the new wire wheels look good on the back.
The rear wheel arch has a lot space between tyre and arch as one would expect and the spinners are less likely to chop off the knees of the local children.
So the job was worth doing.

The snag now is that the front splines are proving difficult for the shop supply so I still have two steel wheels on the front.

Maybe next weekend.

Start of Diff Swap

The next day I found the second hub had moved slightly on the half shaft and it was then possible, with difficulty, to remove the rest of the hub.

I took the half shafts and new hubs to Blaker welding in Dial Post to have the hubs pressed back on.

The weekend was time to actually swap the axles. Quite an easy job really, mainly because the old axle had already been dismantled 10 years ago and it hadn’t seen the outside world much since.

On the old axle, the brake drums were new, the bearings and seals had been replaced and most bolts were new. All this came off easily without having to undo any brake hoses.

The old axle was slid out sideways and then offered up to the “new” axle. The “new” Diff had some extra backlash so the Diffs were swapped. A new gasket was made from a Not-made-from-wheat-made-from-oats-instead-abix packet as both old ones were demolished.

The “new” axle was then slid into place and bolted onto the springs. The original brake backplates then bolted into place.

Time for a tea break.

Half shaft refuses to come off hub

More hassle with the “new” axle.

Trying to remove the half shaft from the wire wheel hub proved difficult.

Even with a hydraulic puller borrowed from work it refused to budge. I left the puller on over night and gave it a tweak the next day and then the bond broke with a crack and the first one was separated.

The next one proved impossible. Even with a good half hour with the blowtorch. I’ll have to find an Engineering facility to remove one and fit both into the new splined hubs.

At least I managed finish de-rusting and to paint the axle and fit new bearings and seals to the hubs.