More slogging

[jim lee]

Monday, September 25, 2017

Its kinda’ becoming a tour of special tools. Pullers, presses, drifts, clamps. Tubing cutters, tube benders, flaring tools, Jack stands, floor jack, Air compressor, air wrenches. Yes, and the new torch for burning steel. I’m collecting tools as fast as truck parts.

And now I’m thinking about a wire feed welder.. Thanks Mark.



I needed this custom drift. It’s what one uses to press in the bushing and seals that are inside the front axle housing. As in, the part that failed transforming my brake job into this delightful adventure.

Turns out Mark, the guy that sold the truck to me, had one of these. He offered to let me use it. Cool! This should put me a day or so ahead.

That’s Mark above, testing out my electric goggles.



Another specialty puller. This one is for pulling OUT the seals and bushings from the front axle. I had to order this one from VPW. (Vintage Power wagon).



Took me a bit to get it working correctly. The problem was that the face your pulling against is not parallel with the stuff your pulling on. It worked though. As did Mark’s drift for bashing in the new bits.



Another puller. This one is for grabbing bearings and ripping them off shafts. It also did its job.

Then I made myself a hand press for pressing on the trunnion bearings. And that didn’t work. We ended up bashing them on, sigh..



So, after pulling all this stuff apart, I have this massive cleanup job to deal with. Luckily I’'d been working on it during down times or when I didn’t want to think about scary bits of the project to come. The bits where I’'m ruining irreplaceable parts and things.



Remember some time ago I was bummed because so many people used chisels to loosen/tighten the eight sided wheel bearing retaining/lock nuts? Because of this, the eight sided socket I bought wouldn’t fit. There was too much metal chiseled up in the way.

My buddy, Steve, took these to his bench-top grinder and smoothed out the peaks where the chisels had cut up the metal. Then I spent some time doing finish work on them with my hand sander. This was to to smooth out the worst of the remaining pokier bits. After that, I hand polished the bearing races on the rear axel locknuts.



Cleaning up a steering knuckle casting. This is getting close to “good enough”. I’'d started with a black blob that you really couldn’t tell what it was.



New trunnion bearing races going in. See the bolt looking like its touching the bearing race? Because it is! I'’d spun in all the hardware to check fit, make sure I had everything and had a good idea where it all went.

When I saw what I’'d done, I was crushed! If I had to order a new race, that would set me back at least another week. Again, I was lucky. The bearing race was harder than the bolt. Only a bit of one thread got crushed and nothing happened to the bearing race.

Whewh! Eyes forward, moving on.



The driver’s side steering knuckle all put back together. I did this on the workbench to make sure it was all there and that, when installed for real, there would be fewer “surprises”.



The steering knuckle is, for better or worse, installed. Then, not shown, was the epic nightmare battle of trying to install the drive axle. Its heavy, cumbersome, don’t bend it or the drive balls may come out. Also, its totally covered in an entire can of grease. And, you don’t dare damage the seal inside the axle case!

It took us about 4 or 5 tries to get the axle back in there. At one point we even removed it completely, put it back on the table and took a break. We were tired and running out of ideas. We needed a reset.

At about that time, Mark, thinking back to what he did to install a stuck transmission, decided we should clean up the splines really well. I was up for any suggestion, so we cleaned them up.



And amazingly enough, that seemed to do the trick. The axle finally slid into the third member splines. Well, with minimal bashing.

Then there was adding shims to set trunnion preload. Ugh!

That’s Mark, running the air ratchet. Either clamping down to test preload, or unscrewing to change shims. We fought this for what seemed like forever. By this time we were both getting really tired and a bit punchy. The best we could do was, remove smallest shim and get 18 ft-lbs or put it back and get 30+ ft-lbs. The window was 25-27 ft-lbs. At this point I called it for the day. We’'d gotten further than I ever expected, so I felt pretty good. Thanks again Mark!



I’'m now stopped because I have been avoiding paint. I don’t want to paint, but I’'m going to have to. These are the somewhat rusty brake backing plates. I need to paint them so I can finish the driver’s side. There are also the rusty brake drums and three more rims that need painting. At this point, ‘'till I get off my behind and do the paining, I’'m stuck.

The greenish bottle contains hull cleaner. (We live in a marine industry kind of area.) This stuff seems to be a mixture of HCl & Oxalic acids. Probably other things as well. You spray it on with a spray bottle, wait 10 minutes and wash off the rust. Of course when I heard this, I scoffed. Then the guy did a little demo for me. I was shocked! It worked like liquid sand blasting. I’'m still somewhat skeptical about this new snake oil, but I’'m going to give it a shot.

We’'ll see..