Landlover99
Active Member
Gentlemen, an update... You may recall I spotted a split in the rubber gaitor that protects the drop arm's ball joint from dirt/water ingress and decided (extremely foolishly in retrospect) to attempt to remedy this (essentially) non-issue that I really should have just ignored and forgotten about. Hell, we don't even have MoTs in my part of the world to worry about! It was loftily asserted by some (apparent) sage on this forum that it was easier to replace the whole arm than to rebuild the ball joint. Fair enough, I thought, and bought a complete new arm. Now I had to get the old one off. Everything went reasonably well until I got to the part where I'd removed the steering shaft nut and needed to drop the arm off its mating splines. It wouldn't budge. Banged it with big hammer (as suggested my many repsondants) to no avail. Only had a Draper 3 leg puller in my toolbox so purchased a new 2 leg one for this purpose, a Bergen "heavy duty commercial quality" job so it said. Looked pretty robust, too Hooked the puller over the arm's removal lugs securely and proceeded to do up the screw. I quickly exhausted all the effort I could bring to bear with an ever-increasing series of longer rachets and plumped for a 600mm breaker bar. With a huge amount of grunt, I finally heard a reassuring "crack" from under the box - only to find that one of the puller's arms had broken off. "Drop forged" indeed - looked more like a casting from the grain at the fracture but I can't be sure. Possibly if it were indeed a casting, though, it would have failed much sooner, I can't say. Anyway, I had a brainwave and removed the remaining good arm and replaced both it and the broken one with 2 arms from the old 3 leg puller. Started winding in again. "Crack!" Surely this time I'd beaten it? Nope! one of the pins that fasten the arm to the body of the puller had shattered. At this point I decided I was going to need some specialist help and got out the Yellow Pages. A competent-looking bloke turned up in another Defender with "Recovery" plastered over it. He confidently announced he'd dealt with this probem before, including on is own 'ender. He produced a tool case with an extremely impressive-looking hydraulic kit inside and set to work. Cost the best part of a grand, he said. I wouldn't have argued. It was clearly a formidable piece of kit and though it was of considerable size, it went on without difficulty. Anyway, fast forward over an hour of grunting and swearing and the puller was back in its case and being placed back in the 'ender along with its accessory kit, leaving my engineer friend to wipe his hands off whilst explaining - with a new modesty that had been hitherto lacking - that though having applied approx. 10 tonnes of pressure against the arm, it hadn't budged one millimeter. "I've never known one like it," he said, "they normally just pop-off in under a minute with this thing." Having left it to absorb some penetrating oil, he's coming back tomorrow with a bigger puller which will require the removal of a few more dangly bits to obtain the necessary access, but I'm wondering WTF to do if this fails as well. I know some folk from last time suggested just cutting if off, but I can't see how one could do this without damaging the splines on the steering shaft. Any suggestions?
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