Front Axle

April 14th 2016

The front axle is a whole subject in itself. I've been doing bits of it as I progress but here it is as a compilation.

• The steering rack had play at both ends.
• Six of the seven rose joints were shot.
• The king pins were knackered.
• The driver's side wheel had positive camber.

Stub Axle


This is the cause of the positive camber. The stub axle was loose and bent.

That slender bolt through the carrier is what held the stub axle in place. It went through a hole in the stub axle. 

But when I took it off I discovered there were 2 holes in the stub axle. Eeek!

That was all that was holding it in the hub carrier.

I decided to get my engineer friend to turn me a new one up but he winced at the cost of buying some bar in. He had a great suggestion, which I suppose you all know about anyway.

It was this. A shoulder bolt.

I just needed to find one,  20mm in diameter. The internet delivers the goods (literally) and £25 lighter of pocket I have a high quality 12.9 grade bolt.

Compared to the outgoing stub axle it wins in the beauty stakes.

First I made sure it fitted the bearings in the wheel. It slipped in beautifully, just a slight resistance.

I'll use that line for my next erotic novel.

It was then surprisingly easy. I chopped the head off. Then tried it in the hub carrier, and fitted the wheel. Then I measured how much more to take off to get the wheel lined up with the brake caliper (and packed away with washers from the carrier the right amount) with the end of the thread just inside the outer bearing.

I doubled checked the measurement because I didn't want to have to buy another bolt at that price. I could have got it a couple of quid cheaper from Thomas Grahams in Kendal, but the fuel to collect it and the wait for them to get it makes the equation not so clear-cut.

So this is with it cut to the correct length ....

Then came some fiddling whilst I gently ground out some scoring in the hub carrier that was preventing the stub going easily all the way into the hole. In the vice I could check it was at right angles in each plane. 

Then I welded the end of it to the hub carrier through the hole in the back.

So, if that needs to come out again it'll be a lathe job.

King Pins

These needed replacing. Some more of the beer can had been slid down between the pin and the bush to take up slack.

The first one I took out (to repair the stub axle) just about fell out, but the other side hadn't been out for some years and needed heat and a hell of a lot of bashing with a bloody big hammer and a drift to shift it.

Something I noticed was that the thrust washers were on top, instead of being on the bottom.

I found a bloke in Devon who does king pin kits for £40 which was £20 quid cheaper than I had seen elsewhere. So that's what I got.

Getting the old bushes out needed a junior hacksaw and some persuasion. I cleaned up the housings and pulled the new ones in using a threaded bar and washers.

You need to pull them in from the inside of the the carrier as the outer ends are crimped to hold the domed (welch) washers. Using the threaded bar also helps to prevent starting the bushes off cock-eyed, which as they are split, can end up in all sorts of bother.

Once in I needed a little easing with wet'n' dry on a dowel (through both bushes, sort of like line-boring) to make the pins move easily with finger pressure.

I've used an adjustable reamer in the past, but for fine adjustment they are too keen.

One done, one to go.

Steering Rack  (Ouch)

I had taken this off earlier. What a job that was. 

It had been fitted with a bracket and allen-headed bolts into a threaded plate on the axle. Using captive threads on a car that is going to to get wet and muddy and be left for a couple of weeks is a recipe for disaster. Lots of heat and careful strong-arm action with a new allen socket got them off.

I couldn't identify the rack from the numbers so resorted to an image search on Google for steering racks.

I found out it is a Mk1 Escort rack. Typical, as they are twice the price of Mini racks at about £115.

So I decided to repair it. The rack end was rattling and the other end was clanking.

Taking the boots off was not a pleasant experience because of what I found......

That's right. No oil or grease and lots of mud. I took the plate off that adjusts the plunger on the rack and the plunger was corroded solid. I used as much heat as I dare on the alloy and got the plunger to move down onto the rack. But it wouldn't return.

The nylon bush at the other end of the rack was very worn.

I decided that, as I could get a new rack if it all went tits-up, I would "adjust" the plunger to allow just a touch of play and remove enough shims to lock it in that position. I got a new nylon bush for the other end. You can get brass bushes at £20 but really for a car that isn't going to go faster than 20 mph, with the wheels having little effect on the direction of travel, I thought that a bit OTT.

When the bush arrived it was the correct diameter for the rack, but too big for the housing. My spoon-whittling skills helped as I attacked it with my Stanley knife and got it to fit. Carving the lugs that fit in the little cutouts wasn't as successful, but I solved that by crimping down the end of the rack tube to locate the bush. The picture makes it clear.

New boots (no panties) finished it off and with a coat of black paint, the rack works, Plus, it has no play. I filled it with SAE 90 gear oil. Anything is better than mud.

With occasional outings and decent lubrication it should last a while before the lack of adjustment renders it obsolete.

For about £50 I could have had a new high ratio Mini rack

But here's a thing. No-one seems to publish data like the travel in the rack. So you can't compare one with another. I don't want to lose any lock.

Spherical End Bearings (Rose Joints)

Not a lot to say. Both radius rods and the inboard ends of the A frame had buggered joints.

I had to use a cutting disc to get them off as the tube spacers on the bolts had corroded solid and one rose joint broke off as I (tried to) unscrew it from the end of the A frame. I drilled and tapped the thread out but wasn't happy with it so I shortened the threaded boss and welded a nut on (located by a bolt holding it to the existing threaded boss). That has worked fine.

All new bolts and joints now.

Here is a taster of things to come. 

Starting to re-visit things now.

May 22nd 2016

So far the work on the car has been just been re-newing things, repairing things and re-fitting them. Except the alternator and water pump which are new installations really.

Water Pump changes

I was concerned that the new water pump position was too high and would lead to air locks in the coolant. I took it off and tried it all ways to find a position to mount it lower down. The distributor is the big problem as it is in the way. The best option was to rotate it about 100 degrees clockwise and have the bottom hose from the rad curl around the distributor to reach the inlet. This meant getting the outlet pipe altered, but it now leads straight down to the engine block connection, which is an improvement.


This is the new position with the inlet below the pump body. You can see I have cut down the radiator shroud, moving the rad forward, to give clearance to the nose of the water pump. This involved fitting a new electric fan which is slimmer than the original, because the other one didn't fit anymore.

The inlet hose curls around the (old and knackered) distributor

This isn't the end of this story, but more of that later.

Front axle mounted

I got the front axle back on with all the new spherical end joints, and boots on the rack and stuff. Getting the mudguard stays re-aligned so the mudguards covered the wheels was a bit tough as they were solid bar, not tube.

Sump

In passing, you may notice the sump is bright and shiny.

This wasn't always so. In fact it was a gungey mess and had some oily gungey mess in one spot which led me to think it had a leak.

Cleaning it up showed some brazing on the original extension to the rear of the sump, but also some "dob".

Dob is usually used to stop a leak until later. In this case it seems to be very much later.

The wire wheel showed it to be car filler. Not my favourite solution to oil leaks.

Removing that showed a minute leak at the end of the run of braze.

Not the end of the world, but now it was off, it needed fixing. 

I don't have brazing gear myself and neither does anyone I know well. So I made a MIG repair and actually got it to seal. Braze and MIG welding don't really work together. 

It held a cupful of petrol in the sump overnight with no signs of leakage, so that'll do for me.

So, a bit of paint and a mysterious bit of angle iron at the front and it was ready to go back.

This is where it was going to fit . Nice to see it was pretty clean in there. The colour of the oil I took out didn't lead me to expect that. 

There does seem to be a welded repair on the right of the oil pump, but I'm not asking why. There's no-one to tell me anyway. Neither was I going to crack the big-ends to look at the bearings as we all know where that leads to. It has nearly 80 psi when cold and that'll do for me. 

It's nice to see the pick-up pipe extended to the back of the sump extension. Good for avoiding oil starvation thrashing up steep hills.

You can also see the vertical legs, which I attached to the new engine mounts. They will support the sumpguard, when fitted.

So now you can see what the angle iron on the sump is for. It will support the front end of the sumpguard. I reasoned that as the thin steel sump had been taking point-impacts for 40 years the spread load of the weld securing the angle and the alloy guard would give the sump an easier life.

That's my theory.

(You get quite a good idea of the new engine mounts in this shot)

Sumpguard

As we have seen the front mounts I may as well describe the fitting now. 

The two mounts at the front will take the main impacts. The guard will continue to the tailshaft of the gearbox with more mounts there, attached to the tailshaft mounts on the chassis. This will leave quite a long unsupported section of the alloy guard, but at that part of the car it's more to do with "sliding over" things than bouncing on them. If I'm wrong I can add more mounts later.

The "U" shaped bit here is what carries the tail shaft and is bolted to the chassis at each end (It's not bolted up tight in this shot so the nylocks are not gripping)

I've added the two legs to bolt the alloy sumpguard plate to.

This is the plate 

The nice gentle curve was achieved by parking my car wheel on one end and lifting the other end of the plate up!

And this is it in place....

You can see a small kick-up at the rear end as well (same technique). This is to help prevent catching the back end of the guard when reversing off things.

At some point someone has coated the underside of the gearbox in a rubbery paint. Possibly to help protect it against damage? I'm not into scraping paint off gearboxes. Maybe later.

This is how it is fitted at the front. The very front edge is behind and above the axle and should never come into contact with anything.

Moving on.  The back brakes.

The brakes I took off were very poor.  The pads had come away from their backing plates and the discs were badly rusted, which I mentioned in the first post in the blog last December.

I was going to get Green Stuff pads from EBC, but refurb costs are spiralling now and some unused, old stock, standard pads on eBay came winging their way to me for £5 including postage. At £40 less than EBC pads, I just couldn't say no.

eBay has been a wonderful resource for this job.

Cleaning the calipers and a touch of matt black paint made it all seem clinical at the back end.

The discs (£10.70 on eBay) are also 2mm thinner than the Ford spec discs. That makes putting the new pads in and fitting quite a bit easier. 

Even the bleed nipples came undone easily! See those wheel studs? Too short. I needed some more. 

You may have spotted a body panel fitted as well in this shot. It's got to the stage where I need at least the back ones on to fit things to.

This progress meant that I was also ready to mount the fiddle-brake levers, along with their new 0.625" master cylinders.

Before

Without all the pipery for the remote reservoir they look a lot neater.

More shiny panels 'round't back. (And some new Veale Industries mudguards.)

All looking a bit fresher looking

That's a point: The exhaust

One thing that was obvious when I got the car was that the manifold branch pipes from the Imp manifold we absolutely jiggered. 

The Imp manifold is in reasonable condition, but after that it's a bun-party of solder, braze and exhaust paste holding together some fresh air.

I spent quite a time trying to find some 30 degree mandrel bends in 30mm pipe. Not easy and not cheap. Then whilst rummaging in my "spares" pile I came just what I needed. Together with a "Y" piece I begged from an exhaust centre (not brand new) I managed to make some longer manifold pipes. I would have liked to lengthen the primary pipes as well, (for better torque) but didn't want to mess about with what is probably quite an efficient Imp header.

The pipe bends were a great find, can you guess what it is yet?

Of course. They are wheelbarrow handles. I had a spare wheelbarrow frame stacked against the wall.

The outlet on the silencer must have been strangling the engine. It was just 1", with a right angle bend

So I cut that away and used a bigger swept bend I had in my "useful items" pile.

So. here it is.

Well that's it for the moment. 

Sorry about all the pics. If you connection is steam-driven it will have been a bit slow to load.

I still have the wiring to touch on, which includes a new distributor, and more on the cooling system front.

Oh, and the trailer.

Here's a taster....

Smaller, fiddly bits.

11th June 2016

Where to start?

It all gets done in a jumble but I'll deal with it in sections.

Wiring

This has been developing into a plan as I have worked along.

The car originally had two batteries and no alternator. I have fitted an alternator and taken one battery off. This means the wiring to the mandatory cut-out switch is more complex. It needs to kill the ignition feed as well as isolating the battery, or the car will keep running on the alternator output.
So when I fitted the new conduit for the battery cable through the cockpit I put in two extra cables to take power from the ignition switch to the cut-out switch on the back panel and then back to the coil.
This meant a new FIA cut-out switch and wiring a resistor in-between it and the earth, to protect the alternator when the cut-out switch is operated.

This is the new battery tray and the battery cables ready for the switch to be connected.

You can also see a new fuel filter I have put in. I should replace the fuel pipes as well as modern petrol has ethanols which attack the older rubber in these old pipes. (see how you just can't deal with one subject at a time).

This is the battery fixed with a new battery clamp and the cut-out switch wired in.

The white thing above the battery clamp is the resistor cable-tied to a chassis member. The blue battery clamp cap needs to be painted yellow yet.

Moving forwards to the engine and cockpit, I had placed some cables from and to various components to get an idea how much there was to combine into a loom. I do have loom tape, but the draw-back is that having wrapped the cables, any changes mean re-doing it. I decided to use some split flexible conduit to make life easier.

This shot shows the conduit carrying the alternator cables around the front of the engine.

It drops down to the starter, which is where the output from the alternator joins the battery cable and then the other cables join that bunch running up alongside the new HT lead. It's pretty simple.

In the cockpit I made a new tray to hold the electrics. The old coil can be see top left. I didn't want it there as  I am making a full bulkhead and the coil is in the way. So I am fitting it to the tray and also moving the temperature capillary tube over that chassis frame rail as well as the cables. I have made a panel to hold the gauges and switches.

This is with the (new) coil fitted and generally tidied-up.

Distributor

You may remember the manky old distributor.

I decided that as it is mounted low down and a bit tricky to get to, and points and a condenser wouldn't be that cheap I would get a new electronic distributor from PowerSpark, and new HT leads and coil whilst I was at it. The old coil showed no resistance through the low tension circuit and the electronic ignition deserved a decent coil.

So they arrived.

Complete with instructions they were easy enough to fit. However setting the timing needed a strobe light as I couldn't see how to use a bulb to get the static timing set. I borrowed a Snap-On light from a mate and used that. Easy-peasy. You dial-in the advance you need at particular revs and just use the TDC mark and pulley notch. You can do it the other way around and turn the advance knob on the light until the marks line up and read off what the setting is.

I then connected the vacuum advance and ..... then I disconnected it. It occurred to me that I didn't want the timing being advanced at low revs, low throttle openings. That's the very situation when a slight rise in incline will put the motor under load and if the timings has been advanced, it won't cope as well. So I am running without vacuum advance.

Wheels

In the meantime I have been scraping yellow paint from the alloy front wheels and one is sort of OK but the other had other coats of paint beneath.

It was easier just to paint it. (That's tape on the tyre)

The rear wheels were a complete pain. I had decided I may get them sandblasted, but ran out of enthusiasm for that as there isn't anyone nearby. So I spent noisy hours stripping them myself. I wish I had had them blasted now. They aren't perfect, and never will be, but look a but smarter. The insides are red because I had some red Rustoleum spray paint. No other reason.

Whilst I was at this I found the 3rd (spare) spoked wheel has a different offset and is too close to the springs on the coilovers.

It's going to be the spare and will probably never be used, but in the interest of uniformity I decided to get a spacer to get it right. Before I ordered anything I had a brainwave. The old discs have a hub-shaped front flange which 5 minutes with an angle grinder released and hey-presto. Free spacer, perfect fit. It's about 7mm thick which moves the wheel out just enough. I have used the small grub screw threads to fit screws so that it is permanently fitted to the wheel flange.

Of course, things are never that simple. The wheel studs were not long enough now for the thicker wheel flange. To be honest they never were long enough. So I ordered some longer ones and some new wheel nuts as the existing ones are a dubious fit anyway. Pretty easy to fit the studs. I did take the half shafts out.

This on-line buying is amazing. All this would have been difficult/expensive in the bad old days of catalogues and mail order.

Cooling update

Having moved the water pump and got the engine running smoothly (carb clean and adjustment)

I discovered the cooling still wasn't happening. The rad was stone cold. It's a Mini rad on it's side, so working as a crossflow and the top will air-lock above the top hose inlet anyway. But I was having difficulty priming the system to fill it. Taking the water pump outlet hose off and filling through that nearly worked but I needed to be able to let air out at the other side of the rad.

On-line (again) I found an in-line water filler neck, which I fitted into the top hose.

It worked! Now I have a warm rad.

Not quite right yet though. I knew there was no thermostat fitted so decided to put one in. Got one and fitted it. Now the motor warms up quickly, and then controls itself properly. There is a theory that says that certain cylinder heads get hot spots if you don't run a thermostat, as they rely on the back pressure to scavenge the hot water from hot pockets in the casting.

We'll see.

Brake pedal

When I got the car the front brake pedal was canted over to the right. 

This makes it a bit close to the throttle pedal, if you wear big boots. So I decided to alter it.

The clutch pedal was also too high so I made a new shorter pushrod for the master cylinder.

Gear Lever

Getting quite picky now. The gear lever was open to the elements and as I had a spare Mini steering rack boot.........

Do you know? I think that's enough for this post. 

So the trailer and bonnet can wait 'till the next.