Saturday, March 12, 2011

Front Assembly (part 1)

We finally finished (and assembled) the right front assembly. It took about a month working here-and-there on it, but I am quite pleased with the results. The restored assembly has a new ball joint, bearings, and brake rotor. Everything else was reused after being wire brushed and repainted. The picture above shows the initial condition of the assembly on the left and the restored results on the right. It definitely looks much better now, although you can't see the paint drips from the rushed paint job. (I need to work on my painting patience.)

We planned to only disassemble one front assembly unit at a time and this decision proved to be valuable. While we were reassembling the parts back together we had problems seating the felt oil seal. Initially we had put it on backwards and did not have enough space to slip the stub axle bolt back on properly. We had to reference the old assembly unit on how to put it together correctly and only then realized we had to flip the oil seal and tap it into place so that the stub axle would have enough space to slip the bolt back on. Now to repeat the process with the left front assembly...