So, that means we’ll need to clear out the whole garage, again, and having some wheels on the chassis makes that a whole lot easier. Ideally I want to have the suspension set-up completely by that date, but we’ll see.

One thing I noticed at the front was that the damper bracket opening was a bit smaller than the one on the left. This is probably caused by the welding process which puts strain on the metal and causes it to bend. We’re talking 2 milimeters I think. With a piece of thread and two M12 nuts I carefully widened the bracket a bit, just enough to get proper clearance on the damper.

Apart from one bolt I’m missing for the front (the one I had got damaged somehow) I’m also going to need two pieces of brake pipe for connecting the flexible hose to the front calipers. Looking at most other GD builds and the pictures I have from GD, the routing often does not make sense to me, so I’ve experimented with some different configurations. Basically, there are 2 things to vary:

1. the positioning of the donor bracket (upside down / normal);
2. routing of the flexible brake hose, what I’ve called ‘north’ and ‘south’.

Positioning the bracket seemed to quickly lead to the ‘upside down’ solution for me (see also Simon’s post, although he reaches the opposite conclusion)

Next, the routing of the flexible brake hose. The ‘northbound’ routing seemed to work best for me. It does not come anywhere near any suspension part, neither in full bump, full droop and at both extremes of the steering.

I find that another advantage of the northbound route is that the routing of the fixed piping is greatly simplified, just needing a short piece with two bends, instead of routing it through the caliper openings.

It may of course be the case I’m missing something completely, as the setup with the upside down bracket and the northbound routing of the hose is basically different than everyone elses setup?

Starting with the original 5 shims (although I think the original shims were of different thickness) turned out to be ok. I also started with the original setup of 3 shims to the front and 2 shims at the back. This gave me a 4.4° on the left side and 5.0° on the right side of the car.

Leaving the left side of the car alone, I moved all 3 shims to the back and that gave me 4.5° on the right side.

Should be close enough for now. The measurement is sort of ‘an estimate of what it should be’ at the moment. It does not really matter what the castor is (within reason obviously) as long as both sides are equal, we should be good to go. (Not that I have hands-on experience with this, it’s all theory for me still)

I’ve got a bit of a routine by now for the final assembly of a part of the car. Roughly it goes like:

1. clean all the parts;
2. put on the appropriate (nord-lock) washer;
3. put some copper grease on the threads;
4. hand-tighten the nuts;
5. get out the torque-wrench;
6. get back into the office to look up the torque requirements (optional step in theory, I always forget what the torque was);
7. torque em-up;
8. mark with nail-polish that it’s done.

(and take some pictures in between all that)

So, what’s left for the rear end?

• I want to replace the straight grease nipples on the Upper Joints with bended ones, as the straight ones seem unreachable, at least with my grease gun;
• need to double check the torque on the big castellated nuts at the end of the drive-shafts keeping the hub in place, 75 Nm seems a bit low;
• the original jag had some protective covers for the drive shafts, should I fit these? They seem a bit flimsy to me;
• mount the whole thing to the chassis obviously.

I think that is about it.

Having both the hubs completed, I wanted to do a quick measurement of rear toe-in (or, let’s hope not, toe-out). So, clamped the laser to both hubs and marked the two projections on the garage-door.

Result: a bit more than 5mm overall toe-in over 4 meters. It’s on the good side of the scale at least! (If it had not been I would not have known how to correct it BTW). The value seems a bit on the low end of the acceptable range, but once the rear-end is in the chassis, I’ll do some more detailed measurements.

Rest of the day was filled with entertaining some friends coming over and a couple of minor jobs, one of which was to paint the upper ball joints as they started to show some rust. We can’t have that, obviously!

Then, put the disc and stub onto the stub axle.

Grease up the other bearing and press this one in by hand. Put some more grease on top of the bearing.

Put the D-washer on top and hand-tighten the nut while turning the disc.

While turning the disc, torque up the nut up to 25ftlbs; the disc should still be able to turn albeit with some resistance. Loosen the nut by one flat and put on the locking cap and splitpin. I followed this procedure found at: http://www.bernardembden.com/xjs/hub/index.htm after trying to actually measure the endfloat.

After that, I filled up the cavity with grease, which takes quite a bit of it! The new black caps dont come with a hole, so I drilled one in to be able to let the air out and being able to see when to stop putting grease in! Once it comes out, you’re actually too late already, because it will keep coming out for 5 minutes more.

When assembling with these washers it’s somewhat important to watch the surface friction and make sure the pair of rings stay in their “compressed” state. I do this by sort of overlubricating the contact surface to make sure the surface friction is less than the friction between the rings. After that’s it’s just a matter of torque-ing all ten of them up and taking a picture.

Next step would be to bring the uprights and the hubs together, at which point I realised there were 2 oil seals involved needing a 12 hour soak before assembling. So, that more or less stopped the assembly on this part for today.

And I had them all layed out so neatly…..

After assembly, I noticed that the right side fulcrum shaft was a about a centimeter shorter than the shaft used on the left side ???. After fastening them both the left side didn’t “clamp”, so the longer one is definitely not right. Checking the invoices from the supplier did not show a difference between the shafts. So, I’ll have to contact them about that next week.

The upper wishbone fitting also did not go as planned. While the right side one fits nicely, the left uppper wishbone does not clear the chassis as can be seen in the picture below.

Now, before I start cutting into the chassis, I’m going to chat to some other people on this. It’s not much of a difference and I probably could force fit it, but I want to make sure I’m not doing anything else wrong. The right side is a snug fit, just clearing the chassis.

All in all a bit less than I had planned for today. Oh well.

The other wishbone is even worse, something which I already noticed when fitting the GD brackets to them. I think I’ll have to construct some sort of temporary press to push the wishbone arms a bit apart to be able to fit the right side.

On the other hand, pressing the water deflectors on to the uprights was an easy job, using the press.

I’m running out of nordlock washers, so I’ll order a few next week. Once I have them I can finish the whole front-end I guess. I had planned to do the rear-end first, but I think I’ll create the same wheelbarrow as Andy did.

“It’s been 117 days since my last confession…”

So, perhaps a little status update is in order. Although I declared the garaged finished earlier, there’s always something that needs to be finished/improved. So, this summer we place 2 new windows in the south wall.

Although not a very big job, it always takes more time than originally planned. And yet again, I forgot to take a picture of the finished project!

Blogging wise, time was spent migrating from Blogger.com to a local WordPress installation. This allows me to use all the server stuff I already have in place in the office anyway and gives me a bit more control over the blog. I also got fed up with google analytics slowing the blog down even further than I do myself with all the pictures.

WordPress also gives me a couple of extra options which would be harder to do at blogger:

• iphone specific theme;
• support for pages and posts within my ecto blogging client;
• support for both categories and tags;
• more flexible uploads which I’ll need shortly.

I have tried to keep all URLs the same where possible. All feeds and links should still work as they did on Blogger. I had to sacrifice the ‘Followers’ widget and the ‘Profile details’ which are Blogger specific items. There’s some work left to cater for Internet Explorer users (although they should use a better browser anyway).

Work on the cobra has been a bit slow, partly due to the above. All donor parts are basically done and waiting for me to put them on to the chassis. For the front-end I assemble the uprights, at first a bit baffled why the ball joints did not fit.

and did a trial fit, only to find out the bracket would not fit. (both of them in fact). In the end I had to put the wishbones under the press and squeeze it a bit to be able to get the bolts in. Let’s call it an ‘engineering fit‘.

I probably should have painted the other holes which are not used; I did not realise it at the time.

Here’s also a detail of the Nord-Lock washers I’m using. As a rule of thumb I’m adding around 20% to the specified torque numbers in the jaguar manual. With the nordlock-washers that should lead to about the same bolt tension.