Axle finally in place.

Again a long time since the last update and again this one will be a work in progress as all my pictures are about 6000 miles away. Its 3 a.m and Ive nothing better to do as I cant sleep on my first night in Japan, I'm here on business for 4 days.

One thing that's struck me already is how well organised everything is, its clean, tidy and the trains run bang on time.

Back to what this site is really about.

Well we left off with the axle built up finally and ready to fit the chassis back on, happy to say that fitting the chassis 2nd time round was much easier once I knew the order to fit it in. I also found that by setting the front of the chassis at the right height enabled the diff carrier bolts to line up much better than last time. With all bolts in I set up the measurement from scratch again and found that the N/S now toed out!

Most annoying! So I measured again to make sure ans sure enough something must have changed when putting it bacl together. So there was only one thing for it, I'd have to adjust the shims with the axle in place.

With the chassis jacked up I was able to withdraw the lower pivot shaft to the rear of the car and following Simons advice I used an old bolt wrapped in masking tape to stop any washers shifting out of place.

With pivot shaft removed I could easily cu the lock wire away.

Undo the bolts and adjust the shimming, I removed teh N/S front shim and did the bolts back up. Put it all back together and remeasured to toe. Horrah! it was within the required vales and gave me a final setting of N/S toe in 0.26mm, O/S toe in 0.54mm giving total toe 0.79mm with a thrust of 0.7mm to the N/S.

So I jacked it up and removed the pivot shaft again so I could lock wire the pivot bracket bolts.

And put it all back to gether properly. Crossed fingers and remeasured, no change!

Job done!

Final axle assembly.

With the shimming sorted the axle can now be finally assembled. The axle was stripped down again and the diff put back up on the bench, I started by lock wiring the pivot bracket bolts. I'm fairly happy with my first attempt at lock wiring.

Next on the disc shims and disc's.


Followed by the caliper's.


Cross Pipes and hand brake calipers next.


Hand brake pads set as per Haynes manual instructions.

Finally the main pads go in and thats that, diff assembly completed.

I'm rather pleased with that!

The diff was then put back on its 8" blocks on the floor as it would get too heavy for teh work bench from here on in.

The axle was built back up again starting with the lower arms and this time putting the bearing together with grease. Ive documented the last bearing going together as it was a lot easier taking pictures with the arms held in place on the diff!

Step 1
Bearing tube is in

Step 2
Inner thrust washer goes on with grease.

Step3
Seal fits over the inner thrust washer.

Step4
Seal retainer goes over the seal

Step 5
Outer thrust washer fits over the lot.


Thats it, do that 8 times and after a bit of juggling the pivot shafts can be tapped through not forgetting the spacer tube!

Then on go the GD brackets, hub (with shim's) and drive shaft assemblies.

Just to remember what it looked like when purchased on the 3rd November 2003!


And now the finished article.

I'm a bit chuffed with that!

Bit of an update

Well its been a while since Ive updated this blog, I have been doing things but have neglected to keep this updated. So here goes at an update.

As I left it the rear axle was temporarily assembled ready to check the toe and thrust so I decided that measuring the toe in on the floor wasnt really worth it, Id have to measure it again on chassis anyway.

First off before fitting the axle I marked the center of the chassis at the front and the back and then stretched a string line between the two points.

I then positioned the chassis over the axle and attempted to bolt it up, here I found out why GD recommend fitting the rear axle first before the front, it makes the chassis a whole lot lighter!!

With a lot of battling the axle was bolted in and I could start to measure up.

Here again I saw no reason the reinvent the wheel, so I followed Simons measurement method as described on his blog. Theres no need for me to go into it here, if you want to know how its done see the link to Simons build in the Links section and look under running gear.

Anyway the initial results were not too bad I had toe out. So I jacked up the chassis and fitted shims in situ, now here I saw the benefit of not fully assembling the axle, I could undo the pivot bracket bolts and add shims without removing the inner pivot shafts.

Working on the O/S first I adjust the front shimming from 12 thou to 7 thou and remeasured, the O/S now toed in by 0.22mm So onto the N/S and again adjusted the front to 7 thou, remeasured and obtained 0.30mm toe in.

Simply all I had to do now was drop the axle out and fully assemble it for final fittment. Simple he says!!

Rear end assembly.

With a full day in the garage at my disposal I decided to carry on with the rear end trial assembly. My aim is to build it all up as it will be, set camber, toe and thrust and then remove the axle from the chassis. Then I can strip it back down again to finally assemble it with correct torques and lock wire.

Having mounted the diff. 8" off the floor I proceeded to mount the first lower arm, this fairly easy with care being required to stop the inner bearing tube popping out of the small thrust washer.

The other side proved more of an issue however. The bearing tube refused to go into the bearing, both side of the wishbone were the same with either of the two remaining tubes.


This is not what I need! So after a bit of head scratching I realised whatever happened those bearings had to come out so I carefully removed the bearings again.

With the bearings out the tubes fitted easily so the problem must be the bearing journal crushing the bearing down, on closer inspection the problem became apparent.

I have failed to clean all of the POR15 from the casting, hence this small amount was reducing the ID by enough to crush the bearing and prevent the tube from fitting. Out came the paint stripper again and after a fair bit of work on both side I was happy the paint was gone. Of course this involved removing the grease nipples and cleaning it all again.

With the bearing tubes now nicely fitted I applied the inner thrust washer before offering up to the pivot bracket. Ill get more pictures of the bearing setup at final assembly time.

So both lower wishbones now on and 2 3" fence post sections placed under the end as per GD's instructions. You can see in the picture that Ive fitted the GD carrier brackets and torqued up the pivot shaft nuts with plenty of washers to protect the nylon section of the nyloc.


In this picture you can just see the hub and drive shaft assembly, these I pre-assembled for both sides.

Here's everything ready to go.

Two things not to forget, the wheel bearing shim which came with the hub and the seal track.



With loctite on the splines the drive shaft dropped easily into the hub, apply new washer and nut and torque to 100 lbft. Used Simon's trick of a bit of wood to stop the hub from turning.

Job done,just repeat for the other side!

Next step was to fit the hubs to the wishbones, Ive already tried this once but that was without the drive shaft fitted, now the assemblies a bit heavier!

Anyway both hubs fitted OK at first without camber shims.

Measured the camber and it was a bit out, unfortunately I have no picture but I had over 1 degree negative camber. So I applied 5 shims in the end to arrive at this setting.

Not too shabby!

Procedure repeated for the other side where two shims were required to achieve as near zero camber as I could get.

So that's it for the day, I must admit that shifting these bits around has taken its toll on my somewhat unfit frame and I find myself embarrassingly tired! How pleased am I that I installed the chain winch!

Next job is to check what toe Ive got on the setup as it stands.

Rear End fun and games.

Ive deciding that I will replace all of the rear thrust washers and seal retainers for new ones as mine are pitted and worn. I'm confident that a couple of them would not have sealed up properly due to the excessive pitting and may even have worn the seal away.

So that's held up progress a little though Ive ordered the new ones (£104!!).

Following GD's build advice Ive set the diff up 9" off of the bench to get the drop on the lower axle correct, with that done I trial fitted the lower arm with the bearing tubes in place.


Then I fitted one drive shaft after cleaning the bolt holes of paint.

At this point I noticed that the diff had gone off of the level and it turned out my "bench" was bending under the load so I swiftly took it all apart again and have now set the diff up on the floor ready to go again.

Next step is to install the drive shaft to the hub and select appropriate shims for the outer wishbone forks.

Now its starting to look a lot better!

One thing which I may need to attend to is the diff pivot brackets. Ive noticed that I have not yet cleaned the paint away from the surfaces where the thrust washers thrust against! Therefore Im thinking the pivot brackets are coming off again (looking after the shims this time!) to clean them up. Hey ho!

Discs all set.

Spent a bit of time today finishing off the disc shimming. Ive wound up with 20 thou on the right disc (viewed from rear of car) and 25 thou on the left disc. This brings both gaps well within 10 thou of each other on each side. As you can see from the picture below the disc is bang in the middle of the caliper.

So thats it both discs set and the calipers fit OK, I will take them off for the next few operations to reduce weight and improve access.

So next step is to lift the diff up such that it is supported high enough to get the required drop on the lower arms to match road attitude. May need to beef up my work bench as the work mate has a 160 Kg limit!

Problem resolved.

New bolts arrived today and Im glad to say they fit perfectly! So thats its I can now carry on and shim up the discs which judging by my initial look are going to need a few shims to center them up.

Again many thanks to Ed for sorting this one out.

Calipers cause confusion....

Finally made it up to the garage last night with good intentions of fitting the calipers and shimming the rear brake discs.

However as always things conspired against me and I didn't get half of what I wanted done. I did manage to temp fit the rear discs with no shims.

However when trying to fit the caliper bolts through the problem occurred.

This is as far as the bolt goes in, in fact I gave it a little tap with my hammer and that jammed it in solid! Luckily I was able to get it out with the press but if I didn't have that it could have gotten nasty!

I managed to fish out on of my old bolts and when compared you can see a difference.

By measurement the new bolt is 11.16mm in diameter vs 10.8 for the old bolt. The hole in the caliper is around 11mm.

The old bolt fits OK in 3 of the 4 holes in the caliper but still does not quite fit in one.

A few emails to Ed at Wards and a quick conversation today and I am informed that Jaguar used 2 suppliers for their calipers for a while, this one used a slightly smaller bolt hole. Jag, in their wisdom, only have one part number for the two different bolts required. Ed is going to send me some new bolts to try.

Ill let you know how it goes!

Now for something a bit diff..erent!!

One of those frustrating days on Tuesday where me and the old man spent all day in the garage and didn't really have anything to show for it. Basically fitting the diff to the chassis did not yield the results I anticipated. I fitted the diff but the brackets would not line up nicely.


So after a quick call to Andy at GD who said I was doing it all wrong, and a subsequent chat with Simon (fellow GD builder) I decided to abandon initial diff fitting and build the rear axle up off of car.

Once built up the assembly is fitted and the chassis may need to be helped to fit with a sturdy bar!

With the diff now placed at a more workable height on my temporary bench I was able to trial fit the jag pivot brackets to the diff without shims. This showed me that the rear GD diff bracket fitted perfectly but the front one did not.

I tried 5 thou shims one each side which improved the front fit but it would still not go on. Eventually 10 thou on each side enabled the front bracket to fit but now the rear bracket wont go on.

10 thou worth of shim's


A bit more shim fiddling and Ive wound up with 12 thou on each side at the front and 7 thou on each side at the rear, most importantly both brackets fit and the shafts turn relatively freely.

The thinking being that the GD brackets have been drilled to suit the original jag shims, so that should have set my carrier brackets somewhere close. Next thing to do is to fit the discs and calipers setting their shims as I go. I can then fit the lower arms, hubs and drive shafts and sort hub camber. Once all this is done Ill probably drop the calipers off whilst I set up the rear toe in and thrust on car. Once all is set Ill remove the assembly, refit the calipers, lock wire the carrier bracket bolts and caliper bolts ready for final installation.

Hub sorted.

Major thanks to Ed at Wards. Despite Citylinks best efforts at delaying delivery and not ringing my door bell I now have a replacement hub which does not wobble about! Ed was great about it, especially given that it was 2005 that I originally took delivery.

Hub problem, major pain!

Whilst checking out the shims required to install the rear hubs to the wishbones, I noticed that one of the hubs has excessive free play.

The hub was free to move in and out by around 5mm and also could be rocked from side to side. The other hub was fine with no free play at all in any direction! Damn!

A quick email to Ed at Ward Engineering confirmed that I should return the hub for it to be checked, so thatwas that, off it went today and hopefully I should get it back in time for next weeks assembly game!

Still I cant fault Ed, its well over a year since I had these parts. Im not sure if hes charging me though, thats yet to be worked out!

Not much happening.

Not much to report at the moment, no time spent in the garage for a while now. Hoping to get up there next week during my weeks holiday.
Here's the plan.
1) Fit Diff to chassis by top four mounting bolts.
2) Fit diff carrier brackets to chassis.
3) Fit diff pivot brackets loosely to diff.
4) Fit lower pivot bolts through brackets into pivot brackets.
5) Fit shims and bolt up pivot brackets.
6) Remove diff and setup on floor at required height to set geometry.
7) Install brake discs and calipers adjusting shimming to centre disc on caliper.
8) Fit hub to lower arm, adjusting the shims Ive forgotten to buy!
9) Install drive shaft to hub and ensure fully home.
10) Install drive shaft to diff output flange using camber shims to set camber.
11) Adjust toe in at this stage.
12) Fit assembly to chassis (easier than it sounds as I cant lift the diff on its own!)
13) Check toe in again.
14) Check thrust.
15) Adjust as required. (I think this is going to be the killer!)

So that's it, the plan for next Tuesday, Ive a few things to order in before then so Id best get on with it!

Some Progress.

Started preparing the rear axle parts for assembly today. First up the diff carrier brackets needed the pivot shaft holes cleaning out as some paint had run in.

Round file and some wire wool sorted that out.

So now the pivot shafts can go through OK.


Using new bolts Ive temporally mounted the brackets to the diff after cleaning the paint from the mating faces.

After this I turned my attention to the lower arms and again cleaned out all the shaft holes, installed new grease nipples and bearing's.

So that's both arms ready for installation.

Its getting to the point where I can put off no longer the assembly of the rear axle, still not convinced I know what I doing though!

Diff collected today.

Breaking from the engine build updates for a minute...
Today I collected my rebuilt diff from Russ Derbyshire. Thoroughly nice bloke with RAM fitted with an RV8 that sounds awesome. Russ has done a great job on my diff, heres the before pic..



And the after pic..


Now all I need to do is work out the shimming of the pivot bracket's to get the right geometry, this could be fun!