The Little Discovery That Could (financially ruin me)

Had a day to sort the bloody brakes out today.

Fitted a new master cylinder, new bleed screws on all the calipers, and new bleed nipples all around.

I also cleaned and greased the sliders on all the calipers, the fronts in particular were pretty locked up but nothing some red rubber grease couldn't sort.

Results are promising, the pedal is much better than before but not perfect. I'd guess there's still some air in there somewhere, I didn't have time to power bleed everything.

I've also got a working speedometer again as the ABS sensors are all in agreement. Got to have a look at the ABS modulator shuttle valve next and maybe I can evict the 3 amigos.

Also ordered new rear brake pads as they're getting a bit skinny, a rear wheel bearing as it's grumbling (i think) and two track rod ends as the boots have gone and the MOT is approaching fast.

One of these days I'm going to get around to making some bumpers and mounting the winch, hell, I might even get to go green laning.

Keep the faith.
With all the effort you have put in sofar, your guaranteed at least 5 minutes of perfect green Laning before something brakes.

.

codfather79 said:

Keep the faith.
With all the effort you have put in sofar, your guaranteed at least 5 minutes of perfect green Laning before something brakes.

Click to expand...

For all the blood sweat and tears I've put into it so far the thankless bastard thing is trying to kill me

The culprit (please ignore the swanky clutch bleeding tool):



Came off the fast A road from work and pulled into the close where I live after work this evening, and as I slowed down I noticed a strange knocking from by my feet and the gearsticks juddering.

Crawled it onto the drive and lo, the double cardan joint looked fine but was too hot to touch. It's not a greasable one but the PO told me it had been replaced after a failure so I didn't pay it much mind. I guess that would explain the scrapyard paint pen then

I consider myself very lucky that it didn't blow apart at speed and take the gearbox with it, but also 67.93 (inc. VAT and shipping) poorer, for a repair kit including greasable yokes, and new propshaft bolts.

So, next question for those in the know:

Some handsome bloke made a nice linkage for the center difflock the other day. On a scale of 1 to expensive glitter in the oil, what are the chances of me exploding the centre diff by driving carefully for a few days with it locked and the front propshaft removed?

Bonus question: what size exactly are the heads on D2 the front and rear propshaft nuts and bolts? 14mm is tight as all hell and 15mm slips. Something imperial? Is it just to torment us?

Answers and/or sympathy on a postcard, please.

Oh dear.
Been there, done that.
I did around 1k with the diff locked but I didn't push the speed over 40ish
9/16" rings a bell.
Pretty sure that I bashed on a 14mm spanner, but I was roadside with a sheared prop and a cheap spanner set and a rock

You should be ok driving in diff lock (I've not done it in a D2 but I did in my old 90).
9/16 spanner for the bolts on the prop. Don't forget to do the centre bearing inside the yoke

thanks both yeah the kit has the centre bearing bit

If anyone wanted further proof that this thing hates me, look no further. I drove to work this morning with the intention of swapping the track rod ends, having a poke at the fault with the ABS modulator, and maybe putting in the new injector harness that's been kicking around in the boot for weeks.

I got to work just fine, went in to open the roller door and came back to a rapidly expanding puddle of coolant



The top hose was leaking where it clamps onto the radiator. I drained it and couldn't see anything wrong with the clamp, hose or the radiator fitting, so cleaned it all and put it back together then filled it up.

Ran it up to temperature, bled the air out etc, no leaks, lovely.

As i was finishing up I started the (now cold) engine and put some tools away... came back to a puddle, same place. I've changed the jubilee clamp for a wider, newer one and so far so good but this thing really doesn't like me.

I did get around to changing the track rod ends as the boots on both had gone. Foolishly I neglected to check whether both ends were actually threaded and bought 2 ends. Plot twist, they're not, one was press fit and welded, and the shaft itself is ribbed for her pleasure



Nothing a little grinder action couldn't solve though, and i cut the welds around the end, cut along the crimped bit on both sides and pulled the old end out, then chamfered all the edges and welded it back together making sure to penetrate along the joins down into the new shaft.



A little cleanup and paint and you'd never know, so hopefully I got away with that one.

I've just ordered myself a Durite water temperature gauge to match the manifold pressure gauge as I don't trust the one on the dash as far as I could throw it, even when it is working, which isn't often.




I'm going to lie down now and think about how I could have bought a boring reliable cheap car.

And every day you'll 'discover' yet more to fix.

They are, and always will be, the gift that keeps on giving!!!

Tell me about it

Tonight I had a go at evicting the 3 amigos by un-farmering the ABS modulator. You could see what they were shooting for but unfortunately a lack of basic electrical competence seems to have held them back.

(Take a drink every time a photo makes you groan)

For the uninitiated, the theory goes that you bypass the dodgy internal connection between the plug in the shuttle valve module that goes into the bottom of the ABS module body, and the other half of the plug above it. For reasons so far unknown to science, that **** don't work for ****.

To do this you pull the shuttle valve module out, cut out the connections to the plug and discard it, and route new wires out the bottom, one of which you ground to the body, and the other one is joined into a wire in the loom that would originally go to the multi-plug on the ABS module.

What I found... wasn't that.

Here's the weatherproofed ground connection on the inner wing:



Nice, let's lose the duct tape



That's good; because the paint is metallic red you know it conducts electricity really well.

The other wire coming from the bottom of the shuttle valve module was professionally spliced into the loom like this



Which was joined using the no-crimp, no-solder method


That yellow and green wire is supposed to have been cut instead of going to the plug as well btw.

Still, they were nice enough to include some bullet connectors to make removal easier.



I don't really know what they were after with the inside of the shuttle valve module. They obviously subscribed to the 'hot glue' method of connecting wires



Also it was full of mud, who would have thought?



That's some A1 electrical work there

That plug is supposed to have been removed and the two wires that come off the switches extended and fed outside the housing.

God only knows what the SLABS computer thought was going on in here, but it's only the braking system so not important really.

I cut everything off, made up some leads and soldered and heat shrunk them on, then pinned them into a weatherproof plug.

With neither of the switches pressed, the resistance across the switches is 3kΩ



With one switch pressed, it should be 2kΩ



And with both pressed, 1kΩ


So the switches test out fine, excellent.

To cut a long story short, i made up the other side of the plug, one with with a terminal and the other side properly joined into the loom and the wire to the multi-plug cut off.

For the ground i used an existing hole in the inner wing under the power steering reservoir but ground the paint back to bare metal before bolting the terminal on, what a radical idea.



I gave it a shot of zinc primer and put everything back together, then cleared the codes that were stored. This killed one of the 3 amigos


I took it for a blast around the industrial estate but the two lights stayed on, no stored codes though. Weird.



My drive home is about 8 miles and just as I was pulling in the band got back together





Looks like one of the new ABS sensors isn't playing quite right. I'll have to watch the live data and see what's going on as it seemed to agree with the others when I fitted it.

Two steps forward, one step back...

Alright, buckle up, it's propshaft replacing time. Or it was yesterday evening at least.

I've decided to do my bit for the environment by reducing the size of my images hopefully to make everything a bit more readable, let me know if it helps

I won't bore you with every step but I found that a couple of the bearings on the double-cardan end of the prop were rusty and dry




Everything from the UJ at the other end was in good nick as it was a greasable yoke, but I replaced everything as it all came in the kit.

Bit of a bastard to push the bearing cups out with the centre bearing getting in the way but we got there in the end.


Cleaned everything up, gave it a healthy dose of raspberry jam prior to reassembly



Note for anyone else doing this: the double cardan centre bearing goes together a LOT easier if you remember to remove out the little cardboard tube inside that retains the needle bearings when you get it out of the box...



Anyway, got it all loosely fitted back together no problems



Then pressed the bearing cups in with a medium G-clamp and fitted the snap rings It went really easily actually until it didn't



F***

No idea why that broke through, i wasn't vicious with it and only using a g-clamp not a hammer, vise or press.

Managed to save the day (i hope) by rescuing one of the good condition single UJ end cups (which had been receiving grease) from the rubbish pile, cleaning it and transferring the new needle bearings into it then greasing.

Bit of a polish with the wire wheel, you wouldn't even know.

Then pump the grease fittings full of jam until it comes out everywhere



This will help attract dust, road grime and small abrasive rocks, essential to your propshaft's digestive health.

Alternatively you can clean that all out with an airline and your other half's favourite zoo animal onesie



Either way, for now it seems to pivot smoothly, fitted with new non-mangled bolts and nuts using the correct imperial tools, and was finally able to turn off the centre diff lock.

Which resulted in the two amigos going away! hurrah!, apparently if you start the car with the CDL engaged it disables the ABS/TC and the lights come on. Who knew?



They do come back after a short journey, that wheel speed sensor is still misbehaving, but they don't persist between restarts so hopefully that'll go through the MOT no problem. I'll fix it whenever...

A couple of things to address before MOT time though, namely the rust holes in the end of the sill by the rear body mounts, and I really should fit that injector loom kit as it's running a bit rough.

If anyone's got any sage wisdom about where/how i should go about fitting the sender for the extra temperature gauge, I'm all ears.

Cheers!

Pulled the rocker cover off this morning to swap the injector loom and see if I could sort the oil leak down the back of the head. Looks pretty good for an engine with 205k with a history of neglect.



Not a speck of sludge and the cams/rollers look good.

The ECU plug was, of course, full of oil again but it hadn't made it's way inside.


With the new rocker cover gasket fitted and just a dab of RTV in the corners of the half moon bit at the back it was onto something I've been wanting to do since I bought this damned thing.



Regular viewers may recall that I rescued a whole length of this 100x50x5mm wall rectangular box from the man with the gas axe at an engineering firm, and today is the first day of the rest of it's life.

I don't fancy a huge great armoured geometric bumper with 150 lights and a spiky bullbar for exploding pedestrians, I want something a bit more minimal and discrete.

Jack stands got it roughly where I want it, the plan is to work outwards from the middle. angle it back with the headlights and then tie it into the wings.

This position right up under the grille is about 50mm above and 100mm in front of the end of the chassis, so I made some measurements then some scribbles then a cardboard template.




As you may have noticed, I don't generally get much right on the first try, but probably more due to luck than judgement, this was spot on.



I transferred the measurements over to some nice 5mm steel plate that I've been sitting on for a while. I figure the skinny bits up top aren't really doing anything, so I cut those off and that let me nest two into each other on an awkward bit of plate nicely.

Interestingly, the chassis fixturing seems to be imperial on an otherwise metric car, I guess that's a holdover from the dark ages when this chassis was a Range Rover or occasional table or whatever. For anyone playing along at home the vertical distance between centres is 2.5" and the horizontal offset is 1/2" between centres, and they seem to be 1/2" holes.

I've only got metric fasteners but this should give me some adjustability down the line so hopefully a blessing not a curse. Regardless, I busted out the mag broach with a 13S cutter so we've got extra wiggle room on the M12 bolts.




A lot of cutting and some flap disc action later, two nice sturdy brackets. I'll need 4 but baby steps for now until we know the design is good.

Bolted those on the outsides of the chassis rails and I think it looks like a promising start





Just for fun I grabbed the winch that used to live on my Jimny and offered it up, there's tons of room up behind the grille




I think if I box that in to protect it, it'll do nicely even though it's only a 2T pull. I'm not anticipating going mud bogging anytime soon and that's what snatch blocks are for anyway.

It's a Superwinch Terra 45 with the synthetic cable if anyone's interested, I found it was just the job with the (admittedly small and light) Jimny.



I'm going to cut a wedge out of the back of the box section behind the chalk lines in the photo above with the arrows pointing down, and bend it back to follow the angle of the headlights.

For now though, I marked out another pair of brackets, mag broached the holes and ran out of playing time. Back in the workshop early doors tomorrow to see what I can get done.




It's nice to be making something instead of fixing it!

Right, lets pick up where we left off

Decided to incorporate some 21mm holes into the inner plates for shackles or what have you, the mag broach was right there and I had some spare material that would otherwise have been wasted.


I made up a card template of the angle I wanted for the ends, and when I was happy, transferred it to the metal, then chamfered the edges and welded it all shut. Offered it up along with the new brackets to the car to see how we did.





Almost like I know what I'm doing

Took it back off and welded the brackets on properly



Next I put it back on the car and, using a 4' level and a square, marked where the ends need to be cut off level with the wings, then double checked everything was even and made the cuts



Starting to look like something now

Back to the cardboard to make a template for the end plates, blah blah blah



Brief pause to admire welds





I'm sure someone can tell me that it's too cold or the wire was too fast or whatever, but I'm pretty pleased with most of them.

The end plates turned out alright and even mostly matching, seem to line up with the bodywork on both sides which is nice. The aluminium tabs on the bottom of both wings aren't attached to anything so might have to make something up in future to span the gap.

Then a few hours of grinding, wire wheeling and watching several coats of primer dry (literally) later, very happy with phase 1 of the bumper.






I'm not going to bother top coating it yet as in future I've still got to add the winch, some bracketry and maybe some infills to fill in the gaps under the lights, but I'm happy with it or now, and it should keep the MOT man reasonably happy there's no sharp edges or pedestrian mangling protruding bits.

Cheers

Nice work with the front bumper. Very simple and neat. I like it.

That's a lovely bit of work. You'll be starting to get orders for those before long.

Thanks both.

MOT booked for friday, god help me

Good luck.

Thanks to @auld duffer for the tip in another thread, turns out Tiger Seal is great at hiding crimes against welding.



In my defence, i had to use a monster MIG with 1mm wire as no fewer than two smaller machines just wouldn't play ball.

Nearly there for the MOT

judgement day tomorrow