Land Rover - Brake parts painted, swivel bearings
Waiting on parts
This past weekend was a long weekend, which made it a little frustrating that I was mostly waiting on parts. I’ve got a few orders on the go:
- Bulkhead captive nuts/cages
- Brake pipe kit
- Many different steering/braking bits
- Engine still at the machinist
None of them arrived in time for the long weekend. The place I ordered the brake pipe kit from decided to send me a free mug since I’ve spent so much money with them, but they shipped it separately from the brake pipe kit, which is on back order. So, all I managed to get this week was a mug!
To be fair, it’s a good quality mug - but I’d still rather have the parts I ordered. (For those that don’t know, “HUE 166” is the number plate of the very first Land Rover, and the light green colour is also the same.)
Brake bits painted
In a contender for “worst picture posted on the blog so far”, here’s a box with most of the brake bits I painted this weekend. Since the camera really struggles with the black paint I’m using, the major items that have been painted here are the brake and clutch pedals and mounts, the clutch slave cylinder mount, and the brake fluid reservoir.
There are about twenty smaller items that have also been painted but aren’t really worth mentioning. The handbrake lever is still in the paint booth with a second coat because I didn’t like the finish.
New toy
My patience in waiting for Supercheap Auto shop presses to go on sale paid off, with this being half price for the weekend.
It’s a 6-tonne hydraulic shop press, and I got it for $150. I also paid $50 for the accessory kit, which included an extra set of pressure plates, and the collection of different fittings you can see sitting on the press.
It seems like a reasonably high-quality piece of equipment, and the mechanism for changing the fittings is quite clever and easy to use. Overall, I’m very happy, especially for the price.
I immediately put it to use on a few jobs that have been waiting on me getting a shop press, with success - see below. The clean patch of concrete underneath it is because I had to move a bunch of electrical equipment inside the house to make room for it - I really should clean the floor…
Front swivel bearings
I’d test-fitted the front swivels a while ago, and used them to help get the brakes reassembled - I finished that off a while ago, and so I took them back off the axle again to replace all of the bearings.
The half-shaft bearings (below) looked OK after I cleaned them up to see what was going on, but there’s a huge amount of play in all directions (~1mm), and they moved in a really graunchy way.
The Railko bushes (picture below) looked fine, but the replacements are cheap and I may as well replace them while I’m doing the rest of the bearings.
The cone bearings are the worst of the lot - you can see even from the photo how badly pitted they are, and these were the original motivation for replacing all of these bearings.
The front swivels are in good shape - I hadn’t intended for this photo to come out so moody, but I think it looks quite good.
