Since my last post I have been preparing all the suspension parts and axles ready to be galvanised but although I have been working hard, I haven't really had much to show for the effort. However I now have a nice pile of clean parts ready to send away.
Last year I made a small shop press; however in the process of removing the ball joint from the A-frame fulcrum I completely trashed it.
However this gave me a reason to upgrade. Made press 2.0 from the remains of my old press with much stronger beams at the top and bottom and a huge 20 tonne jack! (You can see the previous 5 tonne one on the bench!) I definitely built this one for Landys
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Also started cleaning up the final drive housings ready for painting. I am going to replace the open diffs with Ashcroft ATBs so stripped the final drives in preparation of rebuilding them.
I found I needed to fabricate a tool to hold the drive flanges whilst removing the retaining bolt. The handle is made from the track rod I removed from the Defender, I like the idea of making tools for the Defender out of old Defender parts!
I also started to clean up my wheel hubs. The first image shows what it looked like after being removed from the vehicle.
A quick blast in my blasting drum.
I left the old bearing races in whilst blasting, I am going to replace the bearings anyway so leaving them in protected the inside wall of the hub.
I re-tapped the threads as these were really rusted and difficult to reach with the blasting media.
You can see below that when I removed the bearing races I now have a nice clean and shiny surface for when the new ones go in.
Before paint I masked all the contact areas.
One down, three more to go! And then all the other parts, I am starting to realise this is going to take a lot longer than the year I originally planned!
But when I look at the before and after picture below I think to myself that this is time well spent.