So up at 5am and load the car up and leave by 6am..meet Steve and al at the usual services and then on to the truck, we dragged the car out of the truck as it is easier to work on outside. As Steve was jacking the back end of the car up he leant against the Left hand wheel and slick and it moved..it shouldn't do this..
Not sure if this shows up too well
The hub bearing was loose, the amount of play meant that the wheel had been touching the bodywork which had resulted in a red line round the inside of the slick, so now the first job is to see what is wrong with the bearing, but we did not have the very large socket required to take the hub nut off which was about 58 mm, we identified the bearing but no-one had one or could get it the same day and no-one had a 58mm socket. so it was taken off using the engineers adjustable spanner..(Hammer and Screwdriver) what we found was the bearing had never been seated correctly in the first place the tabbed washer had not been in the right place, probably jumped out while being tightened so the whole thing was loose and probably dangerous.
Steve managed to sort out the washer, re-pack the bearing with grease after cleaning everything up first including the disk and calliper, then re-tighten again and low and behold everything is fine..phew!!
So now the dragster is naked..no body panels on at all...
..which is what we needed to change the gearbox oil, now here's the thing we emptied the gear box removed its sump replaced the gaskets and filter...but then more problems...
This is what we found in the filter!!!! no idea what it is but Steve guessed it might be what is left of some type of gasket sealer..we just don't know, we cleaned it all out and put everything back together again.But! this is when we saw another problem, I know this is getting to be too dam frequent now.....the gear box had cracks in it, this would account for the oil we found in the bottom body panel. the cracks are in the end of the gearbox where it is mounted onto the bodywork.
The gearbox is a power Glide two speed and the cracks are in the tail piece. There was nothing for it but to remove the offending bit and see what we can do with it, this meant undoing the UJ's and moving the entire rear axle assembly backwards to clear the prop shaft away form the gear box., looks like we might get away with getting it welded up, we will see. I was told that a previous owner of the car had UJ seize on them so this might account for the damage on the gearbox.
Next job..replace rocker arm and pushrod..next problem, the rocker arm is ever so slightly different from the rest so didn't fit, we didn't get the throttle pedal sorted out either, so we loosely fitted everything back together...as it has all got to come apart again in the very near future.
Al looking all alone and abandoned
So after 12 hours of work we packed her back up in the truck cleaned up and went home,,,
Tomorrow Steve will take the gearbox tail piece round to a local engineering company to see if he get it welded..here's hoping the John O'Sullivan can do it, I will phone round and try and get a replacement rocker arm and try and find out how much oil goes into the diff, I am hoping Roy Wilding can help me on this,,he did build the axle assembly on this car.
Got my fingers crossed that we can get everything repaired in time for the 31st May..we will see...I want to run an"8".
No comments:
Post a Comment