Good Day ...... Bad Day ...... Good Day

On with rear axle today. The next job was to install the drive shafts into the rear hubs. This done using loctite on the splines and remembering to insert the brass spacer ring first. The castle nut on the drive shaft needs to be tightened up to 100 lb ft torque without the whole lot turning round? - put it on the floor with long piece of wood with a hole drilled in it for one of the wheel studs.

The near-side hub and drive shaft assembly was fitted first. It was necessary to fit shims between the hub and the forked end of the wishbone to take out any play and prevent the fork ends being stressed when the pivot shaft is tightened. The next job was to fit the camber spacers before fitting the drive shaft to the disc. As a first guess I was going to put back the total amount shims present before stripping. So subtracting the brake disc shims already fitted left me with four 20 thou' camber shims.

These were placed on the studs and the drive shaft fitted - as this may be a bit of trial and error it is important not to ruin the steel lock nuts by keep tightening and un-tightening them. A handy tip is to pack out with washers and use only the normal part of the nut when tightening up prior to checking - as shown below.

The next stage was to double check the diff was dead level and then check the camber of the rear hub - GD specify zero degree camber for the rear wheels. So... using a camber gauge the result was:

.... pretty damn close - each camber shim is supposed to give approx 1/4 of a degree - so there was no more adjustment that could be done here. So that's the near-side complete. Same deal for the offside only four shims this time - camber was spot on again: So here we have a near completed rear axle:

It was now time to check the toe-in. These measurements are typically small 0.25-1.00 mm over the width of a wheel. In order to make these easier to measure I used a laser level clamped onto the face of the hub to project the line over a greater distance. You can see in the photo below that the line of the hubs is project to an aluminium box section 2.0m away from the hubs.

The hub faces are then projected backwards 0.3m lining up one laser dot with the corresponding mark from the front measurement. The distance between the other laser dot and mark being the toe-in over 2.3m - this can then be equated to a toe-in over a wheel diameter. Unfortunately my hubs appeared to toe out 0.9mm!! Now without the chassis I couldn't check the thrust line so I couldn't check whether this toe-out was due to one wheel or both - Nothing for it - time to fit the chassis and check. The photo above shows the same procedure only this time the front measurement is taken in line with the front crossmember (2.4m from hub centres) and the pivot holes for the lower wishbone were used to define the centre of the chassis.

The results were mixed:

Toe out (rather than in) was 0.9mm - however the line of thrust was only 1,5mm off centre over 2.4m - well within acceptable limits.

There was only one thing for it now - I would have to add diff shims in-situ!! So the chassis was jacked up and the suspension pulled up using ratchet straps as shown below:

So the next steps were to cut the lockwire on the pivot bracket bolts - withdraw the pivot shaft (without losing all the washers and seals) knock out the distance tube - undo the bolts - insert shims - put it all back together. Would be easy if access wasn't so difficult:

I had a chat with my friend Pythagoras who reckoned I needed 10 thou' behind the rearmost pivot bracket bolt on both sides. Shims only come in 5 and 7 thou' and 10 would be the nearest for what I needed.

A handy tip to prevent losing all the washers and seal is to insert a 3/8 extension bar into the front of the wishbone as the pivot shaft is removed.........

........ and not to remove the pivot shaft fully from the other end:

As Mr Haynes would say "re-assembly is simply a reversal of the above". Although I had worried about having to do this it only took about 3 hours from start to finish. However with plenty of bumps to the head and scraped knuckles.

Everything was jacked back down and the checking procedure run through again......

Old Pythagoras had worked his magic and the numbers read:

Toe in - 0.75mm (GD advised range 0.5 to 2.0 - although as much as 2.0 is best avoided due to increased tyre wear)

Thrust line - as before 1.5mm of centre to the off-side at 2.4m from the rear hub centres.

THANK GOD FOR THAT!!!

So I dropped everything where it was and went for sit down with Mr Carlsberg (and his 5 brothers)!

Tomorrow I may post a diagram of the final measurements.

Turned out alright in the end.