Building a GD427 Cobra Replica » oops

Got one, lost one…

mrb — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:27:00 +0000

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

It should have been easier

mrb — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:46:00 +0000

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.

Crack in the pot…

mrb — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:41:00 +0000

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.

Running out of air

mrb — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:12:00 +0000

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

Yay! and Oops!

mrb — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:49:00 +0000

Success on the pivot shaft:

Some careful sawing and using a vice to hold the puller slowly released the last bits from the pivot shaft.

Yay!
On the other hand, trying to pull the stub axle from its carrier broke my puller:

Oops! I then took the carrier to the local garage where their press quickly persuaded the stub axle to come out. I must get me one of those too!

All the donor parts are now disassembled, so the reconditioning of the diff is next. I ordered the gasket and a replacement pinion seal, let’s hope that is all that is needed.

First day, first problems…

mrb — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:58:00 +0000

Spent the whole Sunday covered in grease; disassembling the rear axle. The start was pretty much ok, got the lower wishbones loose pretty easily. The only somewhat interesting part was getting the bearings out. Two sockets of appropriate size and a vice:

and out they come in no time:

I wish i could say the same for getting the universal joints out of the drive shafts. I already had them soaked with WD40 since the day before. They were all so tight that the vice handle had to be lengthened with a meter of steel pipe and my full weight applied to that (which is a good 10 kilo’s more than it used to be since i stopped smoking). When the day was over, i managed to get 2 universal joints removed. The first was relatively easy (took me only 2 ½ hours). The second was worse and its removal damaged one of the shafts:

Apparently the thing was so tight it scraped some of the metal into a rim. Obviously, that has to be removed again later on, hmm will that be a problem on reassembly?
I’m still suppressing thoughts on the remaining two joints….