SLROC Forum

Hello,

  keeping this up to date has proven difficult lately, as Microsoft have insisted I install "anniversary edition" Windows 10 on my laptop - I see now that, by "anniversary", they mean I'll look back on the day I installed it as the last day my laptop actually worked properly...

  Anyway, I shall prevail against technology:


1) The first job was to remove the steering damper - unfortunately, there was no way it was unbolting at the N/S end, so I had to cut it off...that's cost me 70.00
2) The front axle has an anti-sway bar that bolts on here (next to the suspension spring)...
3) ...and here, to this weird bracket just next to the PAS manifold.
4) The anti-sway bar unbolts from the front axle here...to say it was a bit tight to get off would be an understatement - twenty minutes of lying on my side, kicking the spanner was great fun...
5) The front anti-roll bar then bolts on here...
6) ...and here...

7) ...and was comparatively easy to get off.

At about this point, I realised that disconnecting the axles while the chassis was sitting on them wasn't going to work, so I decided to raise the chassis up on a secure stand, allowing the axles to drop down and away (in theory)...

8 ) I should probably point out that this is not necessarily a Haynes Manual Sanctioned support system...
9) Anyway...with the weight off the axles, I set to disconnecting the bracket that holds the anti-sway bar to the chassis
10) ...the bolts all actually undid, which was a surprise!
11) Next job was to unbolt the front radius arms, which are attached at the back of the axle...
12) ...and the front of the axle, which sits on top of them.

13) The only things left connecting the axle to the chassis now were the steering arm and the suspension tops, which I couldn't unbolt, as they'd rusted themselves round, so another job for the universal spanner...
14) With the bolt removed, the four bolts holding the suspension tower mount all sheared and the damper was revealed...
15) By this time, I'd had to swing the hubs through their full range quite a few times and had noticed a few drips of hub-grease on the floor...this then became a full on cascade from the N/S hub as the seal failed and, it turned out, the O/S seal was almost as bad...ah, good
16) One last job before I packed up that day was to get the winch out of the bumper, so I could see just how rusty the bumper was...it turns out the winch is only held to the bumper with the two bolts that go through the rollers, but the hook won't go back through the rollers...
17) However, the rollers can be removed by removing the c-clip at one end and knocking it through - this took rather more "persuasion" than I was expecting - luckily, I'm working in a tractor shed and tractors, it turns out, respond well to very large hammers...
18) The horizontal rollers wouldn't come out past the vertical rollers and I couldn't even get the screws that hold these in place started...luckily, the universal spanner makes a fairly good universal screwdriver, too...

 I had various ball-joints to remove now, but was awaiting a ball-joint splitter from the internet.com to arrive.  All sorts of excitement coming up, though, so watch this space...

Cheerio

Hello again,

  just a quick one this time - although quite a few jobs done:


1) My ball-joint splitter turned up - the heavy-duty one from Laser with a 60mm opening jaw - splendid piece of kit and go the steering tie-rod off the steering arm very easily.
2) Actually, when these boll-joint go, they go with a hell of a bang, which I wasn't expecting the first time
3) I then set about separating the rear axle from the chassis, starting with this thing, which I think is the self-levelling mechanism.

4) The rear dampers are a lot easier to remove than the front dampers, although they take some stern levering to get them off the chassis mounts.
5) The rear axle has a tie-rod attached in a similar way to the front radius arms, which unbolts fairly easily.
6) I didn't want to go any further with removing the axles at this point (I wasn't *that* happy with my tyre and fence-post chassis mounting mechanism to be honest), so I set about documenting where the last of the wiring went - down through the O/S front out-rigger...

7) ...into the chassis itself...
8 ) ...and then out through this hole, just under the filler neck.
9) And, the fuel lines connect to the fuel filter here, which are all very handily colour coded...


  Now, I was pretty much ready to remove the axles - I'd sort of been intending to get hold of some spring compressors, but I then though that, in theory, if I lifted the chassis up high enough, the axles should just drop out, even with the springs extended - that was the plan, anyway...let's see how than panned out...

Cheerio,

Paul

 Hi Paul
 A longer saga than Coronation St! I am sure it is much more fun though & I am positive you will get your reward in the end.

 Regards
 Allan

Hi Allan,

  it is dragging on a bit, isn't it?  I've not even started putting things back together yet, either!

  Here is the final(!) taking-things-apart posting, though...probably:


1) First thing first then, I still had to remove the tank, so I made a note of where the four pipes and the wires went...
2) ...then decided to hoist the tank out upwards, contrary to what the Haynes manual advises (but it still thinks you have the tub in the way...)
3) A bit of fiddling and levering gets the filler neck out through the chassis...
4) ...and then out it pops like a good'un, job done
5) Hmm...think I might have run my tank a bit dry...
6) Anyway, back to the front and my plan to hoist the chassis up in the air so that the front springs could be removed worked brilliantly (I say in all modesty...)

7) ...but it turned out that it wasn't possible to get the axle out forwards, over the radius arms with the steering tie-rod still attached...
8 ) ...so that had to come off - good old ball-joint separator to the rescue again.
9) With a bit of modest persuasion, out the axle came...and immediately my rudimentary grasp of mechanical physics became apparent as, a) the weight of the diff spun it towards the ground and b) the wheels then collapsed sideways, as the steering was effectively now 90 degrees out and some idiot had removed the steering tie-rod...
10) Luckily, the farmer whose barn this is happened to be passing by at the time and came to the rescue - between us we got the tie-rod back on, although I did feel a bit guilty as a man well into his seventies man-handled the other end of the axle for me...  Anyway, look, no axle!
11) Well, that all went relatively swimmingly, so same story at the rear, eh?  Er, apparently not, as the springs are too well jammed into the rear mounts, so I came up with the idea of levering them out with a trolley jack - this may not be a Haynes Manual sanctioned exercise again, just to warn everybody...
12) With an almighty bang and a subsequent shower of rust returning to Earth from the roof beams, the spring "released" from the mount and the axle dropped to the ground - that was exciting!

13) At this point, I discovered that the rear brakes were jammed on, so I had to take the wheels back off and remove the pads - not at all a massive pain in the @rse - how I laughed about it afterwards...
14) Anyway...wheels back on, I hoisted up the rear of the chassis and rolled the axle out.
15) After a lot of pushing and shoving, I got the axles out of the way and the chassis was ready for its final job...being got rid of.
16) As with a lot of jobs that turn into a nightmare, I didn't take any pictures of the "getting the chassis on the trailer" exercise.  I'd planned to lift the back of the chassis on the engine hoist, lift the front on the chain winch in the roof and then wheel the engine hoist forwards while shortening the chain-winch.  The principle was sound, but bloody physics let me down again - the chassis just straight away fell on the floor and I then had to jack it up onto a trolley and..well..it was a faff, but it ended up on the trailer...
17) So there it goes - as I strapped it down onto the trailer, the cross-member forward of the fuel-tank split and crumbled away to nothing!

It's been a couple of weeks since I achieved all of this - last week, I drove down to Hull and picked up my galvanised bulkhead, an enormous number of galvanised brackets and a replacement dashboard under-fascia (if that's what it's called) - there's also a complete poly-bush kit in the post to me, somwehere - pictures to follow.

Cheerio

Had been waiting on the latest post to see how you were getting on, looks like your almost ready too start the rebuild, thats when the fun starts remembering what goes where, anyway great effort, hope everything works our for you.
Jock

I haven't updated this in a while because I haven't really done anything worth taking pictures of...I'm very much in the "buying stuff" and "wire-bushing stuff" phase, it turns out.  Anyway, in case anybody thought I'd given up and sold the whole thing for parts, here's some pictures to prove I'm not that intelligent:


1. I'd already planned to replace the suspension on the new chassis - I've got new dampers ready to fit and I decided to keep the old springs from the original chassis, as they're thicker, heavy-duty ones.  The first job, then, was to remove the front axle.
2. I have to admit, I'm not entirely happy with the galvanising job on the chassis - it's pretty thick all over, bit it's not taken in a few places due to second-rate grit-blasting.  Although this might be seen as heresy (or is it sacrilege?), I decided to under-seal the chassis.
3. I actually bought an air compressor to do this and I'm really glad I did - under-sealing all this with spray-cans would be a nightmare job!
4. I under-sealed the rear-cross-member, too - I'm not sure that was a good idea on the exposed rear section, so I might rub it back and paint it with stone-chip and some sort of top-coat...

5. So there we go - it takes 4 1-litre cans of under-seal to cover the chassis, but I've gone over parts of it again with a 5th can since then.  I also sprayed into the chassis through every hole I could find, too.
6. One problem I've got is that my gearbox has a PTO on the side of it and this standard exhaust hanger bracket is in the way of it.  On my original chassis, this had been cut off so...
7. ...a quick bit of angle-grinding later and the bracket's gone.  I tell you what, if you think under-sealing a galvanised chassis gives you pause for thought, you should try taking an angle-grinder to one!
8. Now everything (I mean EVERYTHING, even by-standing cows) was covered in under-seal, I decided to start cleaning up the rear axle.  Although I've got a new one, it's a standard axle and this is a heavy-duty Salisbury one, so I'm swapping it.

9. The Salisbury axle fixes to the rear-axle centre-mount differently to the standard axle - it uses this bracket which bolts to the top of the axle.  You can't tell here, but the ball-joint's knackered, so I decided to separate it from the bracket.
10. But...it didn't want to come apart - the ball-joint nut wouldn't shift at all and I couldn't angle-grind it off because it's recessed into the bracket.  I've got a replacement half of the bracket that fits to the centre-support arms, so I only really need the bracket that bolts to the axle, so I decided to start carving things up with my angle-grinder.
11. To say this didn't go well would be an understatement.  Having cut through the ball-joint, the farmer pointed out to me that I hadn't helped myself at all, as the ball-joint shaft still needed to go through the bracket from the bolt-side, as it's tapered.  I looked on the internet.com to see how much a replacement was and, b*gger me, this is the most expensive component on a Defender for its size!  If you can even find one of these, it'll set you back £150-200!  So, before I knackered it any further, I took it to a local engineering firm and had them sort it out for me - they even grit blasted it to clean it up (obviously not the tapered hole).
12. Next job was cleaning up and painting the rear suspension brackets and the centre-support mounts...

13. ...and the cleaned up axle bracket - £200!!!
14. Mind you, that's nothing compared to this - here's a thousand quid's worth of galvanised bulkhead waiting patiently in my shed...
15. ...and here's the new dampers and a steering damper (after I had to cut the old one off...), plus a really heavy box of poly bushes that, allegedly, are all the bushes I'll need...

So, I'm doing various cleaning and painting jobs at the moment - I've also fitted all new track-rod ends and cleaned up and painted all the various front suspension/steering rods etc.  There's £100 worth of stainless nuts and bolts in the back of my van waiting to do all the fitting that's going to happen next and about the same again's worth in the post on its way to me from YRM...  The suspension springs are away being grit-blasted and enamelled and I'm trying to get hold of new galvanised suspension seats and mounting rings etc - so that's where I am - buying stuff, it turns out, takes longer than you'd think...

Cheerio

 Hi There
 You had me worried, I thought there was not going to be a continuation of the saga! If the club has an award for tenacity you must be a prime candidate! good luck with the project.
 Regards

Hi Paul, thanks for the updates
Jock

Hello,

  I'm still sanding and painting, sanding and painting, sanding and paint etc ad infinitum...

  However, I had to do an interesting job today and I took a few pictures, so here's fun you can have with a salisbury rear axle:



So first, a bit of fascinating back-story:  I've been sanding down my rear axle (so to speak) and, as part of that, decided to remove the brake calipers to clean them up, too.  As expected, three of the fixing bolts came out fine and one rounded off - most of the rear axle bolts are double-hex and these seem designed specially to round off at the whim of a hat.  The problem with it being double-hex is that my knackered-nut-removing sockets won't fit over it, so I had a go at cutting a slot in the head and levering it with a big screw-driver - that just broke my (second-favourite) screw driver!
So, I thought I'd grind the head off, remove the caliper and figure it out from there - of course, I should have first figured out that the caliper would be impossible to remove with the bolt stud still inside it - now I had effectively a stuck stud, which wasn't really an improvement.  Oh well...I shelled out on a set of decent (Teng!) stud-extractors and set to work...

1. The stud extractor requires a hole drilled in the stud (fairly easy with cobalt drill-bits) and are then driven with a standard tap-handle...
2. ...which is a $41t way of doing it, as the tap-handle can't cope with the torque and I rounded off the stud-extractor in under a minute.  Second attempt then was with a medium-sized stilson - this looked like it was going to work, but the stud-extractor was too thin for it and would only grip it one go in a hundred attempts, despite how much I swore at it.
3. At this point, I realised I could move the caliper away from its mount enough to get a thin cutting-disk between them - with the bolt cut, I managed to remove the caliper.  Of course, I still had to get the stud out of the mount and it turned out that the hole I'd previously drilled into it was quite badly off-centre at this point, so the only option was to drill it through from the rear, but this meant removing the brake-disk...
4. Unbelievably, when you read the Haynes manual, it goes something like this: removing rear disk - refer to section on removing hub.  Removing hub - refer to section on removing half-shafts.  To change the disks, you have to disassemble the axle?!  Right, well, step one - drain the axle oil.
5. The hub-axle bolts come out fairly easily (plenty of leaking oil, presumably...)

6. The hub pulls out with the half-shaft attached.
7. The Haynes manual at this point says "remove the bolt staking", which I had to look up...it means a compressed section of the bolt that holds it against a flat on the stub-axle.  This is actually fairly easy to do, but I'll be replacing it with the old version of a nut, a locking nut and and a locking washer.
8. The nut can now be removed with a 52mm super-socket, although this is tricky when the axle's not fixed in place by the suspension etc and can rotate (like it can here), as this nut is tightened to 150lb.ft, so needs a fair twist to get it off...
9. This method isn't in the Haynes manual - with the axle strapped down onto the axle-stands and wedged against the engine-hoist with a handy wheel, the nut's actually fairly easy to loosen.
10. Getting the washer out is a bit of a sod, though - I had a magnet on a stick, which proved just the job.

11. The hub comes away from the axle with a few brief taps from Land Rover tool no. 1 with the bearings etc in situ.
12. Hooray!  Hub and disk off - pretty rusty behind, though...
13. I had a sudden thought about using a zip-tie bag to seal of the stub-axle - quite pleased with that!
14. Here are the five bolts that hold the disk to the hub - quite who went home from the LR design office the day this idea was signed off thinking "there's a job well done" should be ashamed of themselves!
15. With a lot of penetrating oil and a scaffolding pole (omitted for clarity), the five bolts were carefully eased out (god help me if I sheared one of these!)

The hub and the disk have rust-welded themselves together, though, so I need to have a bit of a think with that one...

16. Here's some things painted blue - I'm using caliper paint, which goes on lovely.
17. My entry for "pimp your power-steering box"...
18. More blue things - like I said...the paint's nice to use.
19. Here's half the stainless bolts you need to put a Defender together - the big bag is for a two-door chassis, which not everywhere sells - these are from Stig Fixings.
20. Here's the other half of the bolts you need - things must be getting serious if I'm buying stuff from YRM!

Next job, then - attack that bl**dy caliper stud from the back!

Cheerio

If you haven't got past stage 3 yet, I find that welding a nut over the protruding stud is good way to get them moving, it adds heat to the rusty joint and gives you a nice 'new' nut to lever on. Don't worry too much about your welding skills (or percieved lack thereof!). A professional welder would grind back the joint and surrounding metal to sound and shiny to get a good weld -  being an experienced amateur welder  , I just crank the power up and let loose welding the nut to the stud. Reason being that the weld will take to the shiny stud and nut with less chance of sticking to the rusty caliper mount  .

Chances are now that the strain is off the bolt, a couple of squirts of penetrating oil and some heat will get it moving

Hi Sandy,

  thanks or that - I've considered welding a nut onto it. I watched a video on YT where a bloke drilled a hole in the stud and then welded a nut onto it, using the hole as a sort of well for the weld - seemed to work.  I'm planning to drill a hole through what remains of the stud, tap a thread into it, screw a bolt into that and see if that'll start the stud turning - if that doesn't work, I'll have a go at welding a bigger nut onto that...

  What a faff!

Hi Paul bit late in the day for you now but i found the easiest way to get a rounded calliper bolt our was to hammer on a socket thats undersized, works every time for me.
Jock

Happy New Year!

Not much progress lately, but I've been cleaning and de-rusting things - I've also made a start on changing the rear wheel-bearings and it's not as easy a job as you might hope for!


1. More blue bits - this time, the top radiator mount brackets
2. ...and the rear axle brake shields and brackets.
3. After a lot of wire-brushing, the rear calipers are looking serviceable at least...
4. ...I took them apart to aid cleaning, but I'll probably replace the pistons and seals.  To get the pistons out, there needs to be fluid in the calipers, so I can't replace them until they're plumbed back in again...
5. I can paint them blue, though...

6. Here's one of the rear hubs, wire-brushed and paint with red-oxide...
7. ...then painted black.
8. It seemed mad not to change the bearings while I had the hubs off, but it's actually quite an involved job - first, you have to lever the oil seals out...
9. ...I tried doing this by knocking them out from behind, but that doesn't work.
10. This is the inner side of the hub and here's the inner half of bearing, which lifts out easily.  The bearings are in two parts, the inner part with the rollers and an outer, tapered race...

11. ...which has to be "tapped" out with a punch...
12. ...by catching it on the inner lip.
13. The outer-racer than falls out of the bottom of the hub (for those of you out there with OCD more extreme than mine, this takes 39 "taps" with a hammer).
14. Around the lip of the oil seal, rust has accumulated, but the rest of the bore is clean.  I polished it with a small flap-wheel and...
15. ...blew out all the dust and old grease with an air-gun.  Fitting the replacement outer races requires a press - lucky for me, there's one at work, but this is as far as I can go for now.

16. In the meantime, I'd got the axle back from a local engineering company, who'd fixed the sheared caliper bolt (and a few other sheared bolts - bl**dy rust!) and painted it with fertan.
17. After a couple of days, the fertan had done its job and I brushed off any loose dust ready to paint it.
18. There's as many opinions on how to paint an axle as there are people who've done it and, having read quite a few of them, they're all absolutely certain that theirs is the only way it should be done.  Here's the way I did it - wire-brush / fertan / u-pol gravi-gard, which I tested first on my steering guard - seemed to work, so...
19. ...a liberal coating was then sprayed onto the axle - I've left the freezer-bags covering the stub-axles to keep them paint-free.
20. The gravi-gard sprays on with an underseal gun very easily.  Once dry, I had a go at it with a wire-brush and it's very hard-wearing!

So there we go - if only my suspension springs and mounts would turn up, I could start properly rebuilding...

Cheerio

Hello,

  well, I've not died or sold my bits of Defender for scrap, but neither have I taken any pictures lately, so I've had nothing to show

  I've finished a job tonight, though, which I thought was worth a mention.

  I've been putting my rear axle back together after taking it to bits to get at the sheared caliper fixing bolt.  I used a hydraulic press to get the bearing outer-races in and then re-fitted the stub-axles with new gaskets and new mud-shields (I forgot to fit the mud-shield on one side and only realised after I'd tightened the hub-nut - how I laughed).

  The story I thought was worth recounting was how I fitted the bearings - I'd read that a lot of people replaced the Td5 staked nut on the hub with the old (pre '99) adjusting nut and lock nut setup - you can even buy kits of eBay for this specific retrofit and that's what I did.  I'd also read all sorts of horror stories about BritPart hub-nuts having the wrong thread-pitch due to poor QC, so went for a Timkin bearing kit, expecting to get all Timkin parts - shows what I knew...

  What arrived was a weird mix of parts - Timkin bearings, but BritPart nuts, washers, grease, gaskets, c-lips and new dust-caps.  I quickly realised that the difference between the pre '99 and post '99 way of fitting the bearings is this:  pre '99 uses two hub-nuts and a thin washer that you bend both in and out to lock off both nuts.  Post '99 uses a spacer between the bearings, a really thick washer/spacer and then the staked nut.  If you go for the staked nut, you have to hammer part of it flat against the stub-axle to stop it turning, but if you go for the pre '99 method, you have to bend a washer, so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, really.

  The kit I'd been sent confusingly had one old-style hub nut and one staked nut per side, which I think was a mistake, but I decided to stick with the post '99 method, use the old spacers and just stake the new nuts.  Fitting the bearings and inner oil-seal is pretty straight forward (making sure they're "packed" with lithium based grease), but I'd decided to get a bearing driver set to ensure the oil-seal was driven in square.  This turned out to be a waste of time, as the inner oil-seal has a lip on its outer face which would be flattened by the bearing driver, so I just tapped it in with a punch, which was quite easy.

  Getting the hub and inner bearing to fit onto the stub axle is a bit of a faff - you have to get it exactly square and I still can't see how I did it.  Once on, the spacer goes in, the outer bearing presses in easily, the big spacer washer goes on over that and then comes the hub nut...oh yes, the ones everybody on t'internet says don't fit.  One side, the new hub-nut went on fine, but the other side, the new nut started to bind on the thread after half a turn.  I tried one of the old nuts to see if the stub-axle thread had got a bit flattened/bent and it screwed on with no problems - I tried the new nut again and it started binding.  Seeing as I obviously had one of BritParts low QC wrong-thread-pitch nuts, I was left with various options - I went for the slightly cowboy option of re-using the nut I'd taken off, even thought that meant re-staking it...if it somehow comes loose, I'll chalk it up to experience.

  So, hub nuts on, I torqued them up to 30Nm, checked the end-float (by grabbing the hub and trying to wobble it - not end-float gauges here!) then torqued it up to 210Nm (155lb.ft) with a really big torque wrench I'd borrowed from work-  my torque wrench goes up to 150lb.ft, but that's as high as it goes, so I'm not confident it'd be very accurate.  The last thing to do was re-insert the driveshafts and bolt the "drive members" to the hubs - this was pretty easy, except my axle is currently on a pallet, so I had to ratchet-strap it down to stop the torque-wrench just turning the axle over.

  Ta da!  Axle put back together - the next job is to fill it back up with oil and see where it starts leaking back out again, as it inevitably will...

  The chaps who are supplying me my new suspension mount plates swear blind they'll put them in a box and send them to me tomorrow - I've started phoning them every day to ask them how it's going (twice a day, sometimes) and I think they're getting fed up with that   I've got my springs and bumper back, though!  When I get the suspension mounting plates, I'll start taking pictures again.

Cheerio

   .....Fitting the bearings and inner oil-seal is pretty straight forward (making sure they're "packed" with lithium based grease), but I'd decided to get a bearing driver set to ensure the oil-seal was driven in square.  This turned out to be a waste of time, as the inner oil-seal has a lip on its outer face which would be flattened by the bearing driver, so I just tapped it in with a punch, which was quite easy.....

With a smug, know all kind of grin I can confirm that using a hub drive flange coupled with a suitably sized hammer makes an excellent hub seal driver