[geof]

Yep, rust under powder coating is just a disaster waiting to happen, it's not if, it's if when. All starting to look very smart. Very nice Mark.

 

[blackpopracing]

We were told it would be sandblasted, primed & coated. It's obviously just been cleaned & coated over the bare metal.

 

[blackpopracing]

Well tonight was slow going.

The panel in the car was removed so the 5mm rivnuts could be fitted in the parcel shelf. Then it went back in for marking out where the rear speakers will fit. Then it came out again for a bit more trimming and to go to work where I will machine the holes for the speakers.

Then it was back on to the rear axle. Bottom brace bars are now bolted back on the diff with low strength loctite & torqued up.

Bolts start to get lockwired;

And then it was a case of turning a heavy chunk of metal into a really heavy chunk of metal. I can honestly say I don't like Jag rear ends. Heavy, overcomplicated and difficult to work on units. Really, who designs a caliper fixing that you can only get an open ended spanner on and only tighten 1/6th of a turn at a time?? No wonder lockwire is needed as you cant tighten them very much.

I'm halfway through here, handbrake mechanism is loosely fitted but needs lubricating properly before proper fitment.

I reckon we might need the engine hoist to get it back down on the floor, lol.

845 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

I took the rear panel back to work and after a few minutes programming the CNC machine we now have mm perfect speaker holes. I like my big toys at work

With one of Phils speakers resing in place;

Then it was back to the rear axle - almost there!

Diff is just about done now, caliper bolts wired, handbrake adjusters greased & reassembled and all bolted back on.

I did not like the way the brake pipes were just in fresh air so I made up a little bracket and drilled a hole through one of the diff webs to bolt it to. I added a speed hole

so it just needs a little tidying up and painting to finish.

The copper brake pipes will get replaced with Kunifer when I make all the new brake lines.

847.25 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

Well today was the day to fit the rear axle & get it back on its wheels. Did we suceed in doing that?? errr.......no.

We had a lot of fun getting the diff on the trolley jack & manouvering it under the car. It was nice and stable as I had cut a wood board for it to sit on so it was no problem to roll it into position.............where it promptly decided it was nose heavy and fell off the jack

No harm to the diff but a bit of a chunk out of the concrete floor

It was a bit of a challenge for us both to lie under the car & lift it back on but we prevailed.

We then bolted it back in place to the crossmember - made quite difficult as we had already installed the fuel tank which restricted access but we succeeded in the end. I then wired the bolts up and fitted the handbrake cable while Phil sanded the other door for polishing.

When it came to fitting the cable to the actual handbrake I had to look for the clip in the tin of parts.........where I realised the nipple on the cable would pass through the hole in the clip. Now what was needed was some kind of ferrule on the cable to stop this..................probably the sort of thing that might just have been on the cable the day before that I thought was surplus to requirements and had ground off with the angle grinder.........

So I had to make a new one out of a drilled and countersunk bolt with a groove cut into it, the nut secures it nicely to the clamp and also prevents the cable coming out. Unfortunately this is a little thicker than the original fixing so the cable seems to be slightly short which results in the brakes being on with the handbrake in the off position. So tomorrow I will make a new clip to link the two that will be a little longer to give us some free play.

We then went on to fitting the new roller bearings into the second fulcrum arm. The first set went ok, but the second set fought us all the way. Once installed the bearings clamped almost solid on the bearing shaft sleeve. So...out they came for inspection and we tried a different bearing and installed them with the bearing shaft sleeve in the bearings to make sure they were parallel when being fitted.

Still too tight for my liking

We repeated the fitting & removal several times and in the end I resorted to sanding the inside of the fulcrum arm bearing holes with some 280 grit paper wrapped around a long socket to remove a few thou of metal.

After a bit of messing around we got one bearing with nice tolerances but the second one was still wrong. I fished out the last 'spare' used bearing - it was the least good one so it was the last resort, but when it was fitted it was within tolerance with smooth turning and the inner shaft was a good sliding fit with no more binding so we called that a win.

Then we discovered the joys of trying to fit the fulcrum arm back on the diff

Not very easy when the gap between the arm with the seals & washers fitted was 1mm smaller than the width of the axle bracket. So, the nice shiny paint was filed back off the mating surfaces on the diff and we tried again.....and again.....and again......

Eventually we succeeded using a big screwdriver as a lever to create enough of a gap that we could gently hammer the seal & washers in with a rubber mallet.

All of this used up a large amount of time as these things do, so we mocked up a hub carrier and loosely fitted the shocks just for the fun factor. Hopefully tomorrow the other side will go a lot easier! The plan is to get it back on it's tyres again by the end of the weekend.

I can't really tell, but Phil could see the difference of the narrowed axle. With a quick bit of checking the wheel backspacing and some eyeballing from above it looks like I got all the measurements correct and the tyre should just be a finger width inside the arch. Phew!!

852.75 hours.

 

[budetta]

Oh the joys of a Jag axle , I remember the "fun " we used to have fitting the arms. On the clevis cant you just weld a washer or bit of plate and make the correct size hole and slot? That's what I would do .

 

[geof]

Looking good Mark, another option may have been to have assembled the axle on the floor, set it up on blocks and then lowered the car down onto it, there are normally lots of shims required to get everything square, like getting the hub faces parallel, and shims between the drive shafts and output shafts to get the camber angle. I would check the hub faces are parallel before you go too far, incase the fulcrums need the brackets shimming. Also as the drive shafts and fulcrums have been shortened you may have to shim for the camber angle and parallelism. Such fun.

 

[blackpopracing]

Today we set to fitting the rest of the axle.
We got all of the drivers side fitted up only to realise that we forgot to fit the radius arm - which has to be fitted before the outer hub carrier goes on.......doh!

So....it all had to come off again to fit that, once refitted it all went fairly smoothly. Drivers side wheel refitted, yay!

Passenger side went quite smoothly after that - we had learnt from the other side so we avoided all the mistakes. Sadly it took far longer to actually do than it took to write this sentence.

Once it was all fitted up and the wheels back on the handbrake was applied so I could tighten the pivot pins on the handbrake arms and bend over all of the tab washers. With that completed it was dropped back on to the ground - finally it was back on all four tyres after about a year!

With it back on its wheels we checked the camber angles - pretty way off! Quite a lot of shims later we now have the passenger side at 0.75 degrees and the drivers side at 1 degree - spot on for the factory specs. We will let it settle for a bit and with more weight in the car it may change as the suspension drops, so another shim or two may be required once all the weight is back in the car.

Last job was to try to fit the gearbox crossmember back in (radius rods fit to this) but it refused to fit. We think it's probably the paint & stonechip thickness so more fettling will be required tomorrow.

Rear suspension is only fitted on the rods so far, it will be torqued up properly after I have done some shopping at my local bolt supplier to get new nylocs in stainless together with some acorn nuts to finish it off nicely. This is one of the 3 main hurdles now jumped to getting it finished. The rear springs are still mucky as I thought we would need to fit softer springs - but they seem to be absolutely fine, so they will need to come off for cleaning & painting - more painting! thought I had finished that by now

858.5 hours.

 

[KOBI-Dave.]

Those jag axles really are a boat load of work. Obviously worth it though

 

[mattblack]

I'm disappointed the diff tie bar isn't a big spanner, or 'POP' cut out of steel plate.

 

[blackpopracing]

Phil likes his Maltese cross, he has links to Malta.

Today I was working on my own.

The first job was to make a new handbrake connector a little longer than the original. A bit of 1.5mm steel was drilled & folded up to copy the original but with 5mm extra length. Just needs paint to finish.

Time to wrestle the gearbox crossmember back in.
First a little bit of surgery to the top of the sideplates on it as they were jamming against the floor and stopping it from going high enough. Then a bit of massaging with a BFH to 'ease' the sideplates in a little for more clearance.

This worked pretty well and with a bit of leverage and the use of a jack it mostly lined up. I searched in my store of bolts and found four 1/2" UNF bolts the correct length & shank and managed to fit 3 of them. The last one required the 1/2" drill to be worked through the hole to line it up better.

With some washers sorted out from my washer stash it was all bolted up tight. This took a an awful lot longer to do than it sounds - as these jobs invariably do.

With that done I could start on refitting the radius rods from the rear suspension.

Except they no longer fitted. Of course they didn't....that would be far too easy.
Now the axle is narrowed it has of course altered the radius rod length, they now need shortening. This would be a simple job if I could remove them from the car, but that is no longer possible without stripping the rear hubs off so I had to shorten them under the car. What fun that was

Trying to cut them both perfectly square in limited access on my back is not a job I want to do again.

Anyway, after some time it was all done with some collatteral damage to paintwork, this will be touched in later on (already spot primed in photo). Before anyone comments about single shear fixing they have been like that for 40 years of road use and the plates are 6mm thick with 5/8" bolts and 5/8" rod ends. Plenty strong enough.

After touching in all of the damaged paint areas and bolts heads/nuts with epoxy pimer I moved on to jobs that did not require lying under the car

One of which was finishing off the lower bolt fixings in the rear panel and then drilling the mounting holes for the speakers. Speakers were then fitted so another 2 items less in the boxes around the car. The 40 year old original lower trim panel can be seen in the photo, to be used as a template for the new one.

Another small job was making a cover to hide the pedal assembly;

and with the cover fitted, this will be painted satin black so it 'dissappears ' once everything is done.

Then it was a good clean up of the garage and a bit of bench tidying before calling it a day.

866 hours.

 

[legendlives]

Gotta love a Jag IRS

 

[blackpopracing]

Work continued last night but no photos. All bolts/chips were glossed under the car last night and then I templated the rear parcel shelf for its cover.

I then removed the fuseboard/loom and took it up to the office to start the CAD drawings of all of the wires and their colours/what they are for. This will make it far easier to work out the circuit diagrams for the loom which in turn makes it far easier to plan in real life where all of the wires go.

868.5 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

A bit quiet last night as it was a night in front of the computer writing wiring diagrams and studying schematics of various parts.

Did a short stint in the garage last night as well with the same tonight before I play with my bench PSU to test some circuits.

Some small bits done, all of the bolts & bits for the gearbox crossmember are painted;

The parcel shelf template was turned into an actual shelf;

Bulkhead connector was drilled & fitted to bulkhead for the brake fluid level wiring;

and as I had the black paint out for touching in I had enough for doing the front slotmag recesses;

873.5 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

More computer work last night doing wiring schematics & testing parts - Phils wipers do not self park so that will need investigating further.

Today we made very good progress. We set the car up on the flat section of the garage floor and set about plumblining off the rear axle to set datum points.

With that done we did a lot of triangulation and parallel lines towards the front of the car to establish the centreline and also outer lines. With markings plumbed off the front of the chassis and also the original front crossmember for reference we set about stripping off the old crossmember and setting the chassis at the correct ride height so we can put the correct castor angle in to the crossmember before welding it up.

New crossmember roughly put under the chassis.

As two of the bolts are seized into the chassis this will make it a bit harder to get aligned properly so oversize holes will have to be drilled out into the thin (2mm) plate for alignment on one side before the 10mm steel plates are welded on (which have the holes pre drilled as well as alignment pins into the chassis.

As you can see the old crossmember was FUBAR'd with a capital F.

Fingers crossed we will get the new crossmember all aligned properly tomorrow and welded on to the 10mm bolt plate fixings. If we can manage this then it will be a huge step forward in getting the car completed.

881.5 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

Today we hoped to get the crossmember fitted - did we manage it? - sort of.

It started out well as it gave me a chance to play with my new toy

my plasma cutter.

It soon made light work of cutting the crossmember mounts off the old crossmember and chopping it into 3 to dispose of - a friend wants the centre section as one of his steering rack supports is damaged on his.

Once the mounts were cut off we had to remove the old bits of crossmember off them - this was done using 1mm cutting discs and then a hammer & chisel followed by grinding discs. We decided to do this at the end of the garden to avoid the sparks and mess in the garage - luckily I have tolerant neighbours as it took quite some time to do this.

Then it was on to the fun bit of mocking it up under the car. Unfortunately the fun stopped fairly quickly when we tried to get it centred up on the centreline made up from the rear axle yesterday.This made it massively offset in the chassis which was just not correct.

So.....we put our thinking caps on and did a bit more measuring. We decided to scrap all of the work done yesterday and started again with a centreline taken off the centre of the diff and run through the centre of the front chassis rails where the crossmember fits. We have worked out the rear axle is not perfectly square to the chassis so that will have to be looked at later on - it's not much out and will probably be sorted by altering the shims on the fulcrum arm fittings on the difff - but 1 or 2mm out at the rear axle outer hub line can equal 15mm at the front of the car.

We will get the front crossmember sorted and then make sure the rear axle is square to the front end once it is done.

So with lots of trial & error later it is now loosely bolted up to the chassis. Even though I built the new pads on the crosssmember different heights to give some castor it still needs a big wedge fitted at the back to achieve this as the chassis rails have more downward slope than I realised. We ran out of time at this point so it will be a job for another day.
I guess it's still major progress though as the new crossmember is under the car - just not fully fitted and welded up.
At least it is looking good and square now with both towers leaning back the same amount.

887.5 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

More work on it tonight, I started by welding the locator pins back into the 10mm mounting plates. I had to do the first tack with them bolted to the car and the pin tapped into the chassis with a hammer to centralise them with a nice snug fit.

With the welder turned right up the first tack produced a few sparks - one of which went straight into my ear

- mmmm.....lovely crackly sounds of burning hairs and ear - I managed to turn my head enough to stop it going deeper but lying under the car meant I did not have time to turn over to let it drop out

Once tacked they were taken off and a big rosette weld done on the back.

With that done I made some extra packing peices for the rear mounts together with some smaller wedge bits for the front mounts - 9mm in total at the back which shows how little castor was in the original crossmember as there was no packing at all on that one.

Crossmember is now almost ready for tacking to the mounts, I need to open up the bolt holes on the lower platform a little as it needs to shift to the nearside about 1.5mm to get it spot on, but it's nice & square to the centreline now.

Initial castor is about where I want it to be, fine tuning can be done with the shims once its all fitted up as we have a castor/camber guage tool on loan to us.

Passenger side;

Drivers side

The 0.2 difference is good enough I think.

889.5 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

As I have a day off you all get a matinee performance as well today

After an hour of fettling & adjusting I finallly had the crossmember bolted up tight and in exactly the right place. Some big tacks later it was removed for bench welding. I wrapped it in a wet towel to protect the paint form burning & spatter and gave it the full 180amps to weld the thicker plates together, double row of welding to make sure as well. These welds don't actually hold the front suspension on (the bolts go through the crossmember and then through these plates) they just hold the pin plates to ensure it bolts up correctly - but it's still good to make it nice & solid.

Thats never coming apart again.

Then it got a coat of epoxy primer which can dry while I'm having a late lunch.

Spring got a quick cleanup on the top side and got primed as well.

892.75 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

Back on it after lunch and I stripped the top wishbone mounts off the other suspension as I wanted to use the new painted ones - unfortunately I cannot remove the sleeve bushes from the poly fittings (not without damaging them anyway) so I had to clean them up and prime those as well.

The primer was dry enough on the spring to clean up the other side and get the entire spring primed.

Then it was on to an easier job, figuring out the Vellman wiper delay and wiring the new plug on to Phils wiper motor. The Vellman wiring diagrams are fairly simple but did not match the original wiring, plus the self park did not appear to work.

I stripped the motor to check the internals - which were fine - so it was just trying the wiring to see if it worked or not. after a couple of alterations to the wiring I got it all working as it should - so a quick drawing so I can write it all out properly in CAD and a bit of testing on the wiper switch and I've got it all sussed now.

895.5 hours.

 

[blackpopracing]

Only a small update tonight as it was our club night, but I got a couple of coats of gloss on the crossmember & front spring.

896 hours.