Building a GD427 Cobra Replica

Got one inner oil seal delivered today out of the two ordered, so decided to quickly press that in the rear hub waiting for it. Too quickly it turned out; I pressed it in while it was not lining up exactly with the opening apparently because it bent.

So, out it came again and I’ll have to order a new one. No progress made today

Assembling the rear driveshafts with the universal joints is an easy job (unlike the disassembly of them). Especially using my press, getting in the Universal Joints is very easy to do and the first was completed in no time.

The second however, disaster! The first joint went in smoothly but when I pressed in the second the complete “top lid” of one of the caps broke off!!! Aargh. No idea how this happened. I did not subject the joints to excessive force, although using a press sort of hides these forces.

So, after a minute or two of swearing I pressed out the one joint which, thankfully, did not damage the shaft and came out pretty easily. It should just be a matter of purchasing a new UJ now and pressing that in. All in all, the job took me 4 hours where it should have been like 10 minutes.

When cleaning one of the rear hubs I noticed i crack in the housing, damn. So, that had to be exchanged.

Upside is, trying to give a optimistic swing to it, I now have one less hub to clean.

I am not sure what happened exactly but last week the power went out and I could not get it back on. The earth leakage circuit breaker activated and kept doing that when reset. It turned out the compressor was the cause. Unplugging it allowed the power to come back on. This weekend I had the time to figure out what had happened. Opening up the case and looking inside did not give much hope:

While the cracked housing is bad, that didn’t explain the earth leakage. Opening up the motor itself did though:

That’s fried! I’m hesitant to just put another motor back in. I’m thinking of turning the whole compressor in and getting one back with a little more grunt and running on 3 phase current