Building a GD427 Cobra Replica

Back to the front again, completing the wheel hubs. First, put in the greased up bearing and press in the soaked oil seal:

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.

The missing Nord-Lock washers have arrived. This means I can, in theory, finish the complete buildup of the front suspension. First off was fixing the brake discs to the wheel hubs. As mentioned, instead of the normal spring washers I’m using the Nord-Lock washers where applicable. This is such a place.

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…..

Continued with the front suspension today. As mentioned yesterday, the right lower wishbone needed some help, so the two arms were pulled outwards a bit with a pulley and a piece of wood placed to keep them like that. After that fitting wasn’t that hard.

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.

Last week I got the last two missing thrust washers for the front lower wishbones. Eager to do something I assembled the left side at the front. Should have been an easy job, but I had a hard time putting the inner thrust washers in, because the wishbone is a ‘GD fit’. Took me the best part of an hour which should have been a minute job.

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.