On to the front, there are six bolts on the suspension which need their head drilled for the lock-wire. Mostly a patience job, making sure the bit gets cooled properly and preventing to much pressure on it. 5 bolts went fine, during the sixth the drill-bit broke. As such that isn’t a disaster, you count on the smaller bits to break soon, but the bit got stuck in the bolt! The bolts are jaguar specific and as such a rip-off (around the € 10,- mark I believe). Having no choice, I ordered a new one.

Having the bench drill now is essential, a hole like below just would not be possible by hand. (1.5mm hole, 2.5mm finish)

Back to the back again. The handbrake mechanism comes with two extra helper springs which somehow need to be attached to the chassis. There are two or three locations which would be suitable, but only one of them was reachable with the rivet tool I have. It remains scary to drill holes in the chassis.

At the right bottom you can see the black dot of a more preferable location (it pulls on the spring straight instead of in a slight angle), but unreachable for my tool.

I double checked the torque on the drive shaft nu and got a helpful email from Terry about it too. Torqued it to 136Nm and put in the cotter pin.

The overview Terry sent me had torque numbers for the diff cover nuts as well, so out came the nord-lock washers again and the torque wrench. Probably not that important, but alas, looks nice at least.

Last job was deciding wether to fit the flimsy covers for the drive shafts. General consensus on the fora was a big no-no, so that made the decision a bit easier.

So, rear end done! All that’s left now is to fit it to the chassis. (Likely I’ll come up with new jobs for it soon, but my list is empty for now)

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!

I should have photographed a measuring tape next to the marks, but it’s way less than an inch, so I guess I’m in the clear.

Apparently my measurements weren’t that bad and I got a bit lucky. Measured endfloat now was 0.055 mm which corresponds to just a bit more than 0.002″. This is just above the minimum. Phew!

So, the all trial assembly to the complete rear end is now complete. What is left is the right-side camber shims (waiting for delivery) and measuring toe-in.

One thing I noticed was that there is some play on the left side of the output-shaft of the diff. That is, i can turn the brake-disc a bit without a corresponding movement of the input shaft. The right side has this as well, but much less. I’ll have to consult a jag expert to assess the limits on this. Mr. Haynes does only talk of excessive crownwheel to pinion backlash as the cause of a problem, but not how much of this backlash is allowed (maximally).

Next, I created a dummy shaft for the outer fulcrum, having a slightly smaller width as the hub. This simplifies assembling the hub to the wishbone considerably and makes sure the shims which are inside the fulcrum stay properly positioned.

The “hub—wishbone fit” was pretty much dead on. There are shims to make sure the hub is centred and to prevent bending the ends of the wishbone. I had bought a set of 8 or so but I could only fit (with considerable effort) one shim of 3 or 8 thou (cant remember). Not sure how critical this is.

Next up was setting up the lower wishbone having a 2″ downward slope over its length; presumably emulating the normal ride-height like that. Fitting shims between the drive-shaft and the brake-disc makes it easy to adjust the camber. The one-tenth of a degree negative camber should do just fine for now. I bet I need to revisit this once the car is completed and the proper ride-height is determined.

The big nut on the drive shaft needs to be torqued up (only to 75Nm apparently, which seems small for such a big boy). Doing that is somewhat awkward on just the hub, on the complete assembly however it is basically just a matter of ‘putting the thing on the handbrake’and torque up the nut. Also the previously determined endfloat can be checked again now, which I will do tomorrow.

For the 4 inner lock nuts I’ve have fitted some temporary nuts for now; to be replaced with the metal-lock nuts once the whole assembly is attached to the chassis.

So, for the other side, I still need the inner oil seal and a set of shims to be able to complete it. They should arrive this week.

This completes one rear hub. To complete the other one I’m waiting on the (extra thick) spacer and another inner oil seal.

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

…and greasing up the bearing.

After placing the housing on top of the bearing and filling the cavity with lots of grease, the inner bearing can be driven in, but not completely. Formally, a jaguar specific tool (J15 or something like that) should be used to put pressure on the bearing. This tools contains a machined edge with a specific height (0.152″ I think) which makes sure the bearing is not driven in completely. By leaving a little bit of room a (large) endfloat can be measured and from there the necessary spacer thickness can be calculated. Not having this tool I ordered the thickest spacer (0.148″) for an alternative procedure.

With this spacer on top of the inner bearing the whole hub was put under the press to drive in the bearing. When the spacer is flat with the bearing the endfloat can be measured.

In my case the endfloat was 0.016″ The target endfloat is between 0.002″ and 0.006″, aiming at the average 0.004″. So, instead of the 0.148″ spacer I would need a 0.148″ – 0.012″ = 0.136″ which is exactly the size I took out of the donor part, so I can reuse that one.

This result was expected for one hub only though. One of the hubs had to be replaced because of a crack. It is likely that this hub has different dimensions and another size spacer will be needed. Doing the same procedure for the other hub revealed that the 0.148″ spacer would lead to an endfloat of near zero ?!?

Hmm…

So, I would need a spacer with a minimum thickness of 0.150″ (leading to the minimal endfloat of 0.002″) This spacer used to exist, but apparently not anymore. Need to sleep on this one what to do here.

There are a couple of hurdles to overcome. First, when the thing gets hot gloves are mandatory which makes handling the piece more cumbersome and handling the thrower quickly but steadily over the hub proved to be quite a dexterity challenge.

Next, to much heat will ruin the passivation layer on the zinc, so I do not want to heat them up to the point where that happens.

And third, the heating will expand the part, but we’re talking parts of millimetres here; I figured about .5 mm difference between the cold and heated part. This means we’ll have to make sure the cold part is brought within that range. There’s also not much room for error.

So, first thing was to do a trial run to get some feel for the procedure and the measurements. The cold part inner diameter was about .8mm smaller than the diameter of the edge. Heating did not make it possible to fit the part but clearly showed a difference in size. I had the hub in the freezer overnight which may have helped a bit too, size-wise.

So, the only thing I could think of was putting the ring in a reference position (cold) and marking how far the circumference would go over the edge by pushing sort of in the same manner I would be able to do while handling the hot part. Marking the arc on the ring and then carefully sanding the complete inner diameter of the thrower to enlarge it a little, fitting the piece regularly.

After quite some sanding and trial fitting and two ‘hot sessions’it dropped on!

You can see the reference mark and some burn traces in the bottom part of the picture. I’m not sure if you can make it out on the picture below, but the hard work paid off. Nice fit I think.

Fitting the seating ring and bearing is easy with a press. There is a little bit of room between the bearing and the seating ring. I’m not sure if that is supposed to be there, but I do not want to push too hard with the press on the bearing.

Once talking to a representative of one of these companies, he may, or may not know what he is talking about. He will gladly tell you that the product you are looking for may, or may not be in stock and may, or may not fit the application you want to use it for.

When you finally find 2 or 3 models, which may fit the application, their price difference of around € 50 euro’s a piece may, or may not be explained by their specifications. The most expensive one may, or may not last longer than the cheaper model. There may even, or may not be a story behind them which sounds plausible, but can not be checked.

At the point where you have made up your own mind on what UJ you will purchase, the supplier may, or may not sell it directly to you and may, or may not tell you to call a local dealer. Calling this dealer may, or may not put you into contact with a person asking you what the price of the item was the distributor may or may not have promised you.

Once the UJ has been ordered it may or may not arrive tomorrow morning.

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.

Everything but the nuts at the end also needs greasing. In the end it’s just doing things in the proper sequence. Start off with one side, grease everything up which needs to go on there and press the shaft a little bit through.

With the help of a dummy shaft, I made sure the fulcrum was aligned properly, so I could gently tap it through the distance tube in the middle. The hardest part is then to position the inner set of 4 rings. Everything is slippery due to the grease and there’s not much room. With some patience it’s doable though. Repeat on the other side and make sure the shaft has an equal protrusion on either side.

The last step is to put the GD brackets on. I was a bit nervous about this step, the holes in these brackets are drilled very accurately and if they would not fit it could mean that my shimming was incorrect and I would have to do that bit all over again (and go through all the washer hell too). However, the fit was perfect! Yay! Keeping my fingers crossed this translates into the proper toe-in too later on!

Using the bench drill and a 1.5 mm cobalt drill, creating the holes is quite easy. Next was turning the differential on its feet and re-determining how many shims were needed to get the brake discs in the centre of the calliper. An easy job, though in the end I came up short one shim, which meant I could only finish one side of the differential build up.

The hardest part of assembling the calliper to the diff is fastening the calliper bolts. They are hard to reach as is, but my torque wrench does not fit either, meaning that fastening them up to their specified value is sort of a guess. I could buy a special piece, but that sounds a bit over the top for just these four bolts. After fastening the two you alse get to lock wire them, which went suprisingly well, considering the location.

So, one side done, once the missing shim arrives, the other side should be pretty quick.