Rear Hub Carrier

`Say hello to my leetle friends`

My rear hub carrier strip down kit.
It turns out none of this is actually required. What you really need instead is a Peter.
The Peter I used has sadly (for us, not for him) packed up and is moving back to Oz.
So you need a generic media blasting company that also has a hot bath.

The procedure is:
Remove the bearings, the parking brake shoes and dust guard.
Take the hub carriers that look like this;

to your local media blasting company and they will first give them a hot bath.
So hot in fact all the bearing races fall out.
Next they will vapour blast them with some kind of media in water.
When ready, bung them some beer vouchers and collect your carriers that will look just like this:

Make sure to give them a good wash in case any of the media dust is still present.
In fact this procedure is the same for all the rusty, corroded donor bits. So forget about degreasing, scrubbing, rust removers, wire brushes.

Mind you, they don't do broken stud removal. I had to drill and tap two dust guard fixing screws.

These carriers will not even need painting. But what you should do is spray them with ACF50 but don't get it on the bearing seats.

Fitting the races.
Heat the oven to 150 degrees (fan oven 140) or gas mark 2 and cook for 30 minutes.
Remove from oven and if the races don't just drop in, they will need just a few taps with a bearing drift. Set aside to cool.

As per the AK manual grease and fit the bearings and seals.
The manual doesn't mention about checking the hub play. When the hub nut is tightened there should be around 0.002" play in the hub. You won't feel that small movement so we need a DTI gauge.

I used an old hub nut to temporarily assemble the carrier. These are supposed to be used just the once and at 20 quid each I wasn't going to use a new one. Tighten the nut as tight as possible with a crack bar, it needs to be very tight, the torque setting when finally assembled will be 220 lb/ft

Hold the assembled hub in a vice, set up the DTI and make sure the carrier is pushed down on the hub. Using two screwdrivers on opposite sides, lever the carrier up. You should see just around two thou of movement, or 0.06mm. Any more or less and you need a different shim.

Now remove the hub and end of the drive shaft for assembling the spiders.
Fit the lower fulcrum bearings and proceed as per the manual to fit the brake shoes and then the carrier to the lower swing arm.

Newer donor cars have a huge dust plate which looks very ungainly. I used a angle grinder with a 115mm disc to cut a circle and remove the outer part of the dust shield. Dress with a file, paint with few coats of smooth Hammerite of POR 15 if you are feeling flush and haven't spent enough money yet.

The big disk goes in the bin, sorry I mean recycling, the small disk is the backing plate for the handbrake shoes.
A little chemistry lesson. Take a piece of aluminium and a piece of steel. Put them close to each other but separate with water. Salt water is best but rain water will do. What you have now is a very simple battery cell which will produce an electrical current. Which is fab apart from the fact it tends to reduce the aluminium back to it's bauxite origins. And that is why we have the white powdery mush in the 'before' photo above.
Jaguar would have known this, but apparently ignored it when assembling the dust shield to the aluminium carrier. Well now you know, you can do better. So put some insulation between the two surfaces. I'll use the ACF50 spray and a smear of copper grease. The chap or lady you eventually sell this thing to will be most grateful I'm sure.

The fulcrum races are a bit overkill considering the amount of movement there will be, you would think some simple bushing will be adequate.
Anyway, once fitted as per the manual, check the end float.

Clamp the hub on the spacers that sit on the outside and use two flat blade screwdrivers to move the hub back and forth. The measurement should be as near to zero as possible. I recorded 0.0mm on one hub and 0.01 on the other. Of course, the bearings should not be binding either so check they move freely.

Before fitting brake shoes, I wanted to make a small bracket to positively hold the hand brake cable in place. Not strictly necessary as it will stay in place under its own tension but I wanted a better solution here.
Drill or grind out the hole in the carrier to accept the first lip of the metal end piece of the cable. Drill and tap a 5mm hole for the stud.

I made a bracket from some galvanised steel and then painted silver.

Originally I tried to fabricate the little bracket with a step so I would not need an extra nut as an offset but it ended up a mess and this was just easier. By now I am starting to like things that are easier.

Hand brake shoes.
My God this is so last century. Drum brake shoes. I used to have to deal with these back in the seventies. Twin leading shoes were the cutting edge then. Now here we are again, sweating and cursing them into place against the spring tensioners. Fingers jammed until you fumble for the big screwdriver to free yourself. Still, these are from a 94-97 Jag so I suppose we have to put up with it.

Anyroadup, here is the way I found easiest.
First put the top spring and adjuster in place

Put this on the hub carrier and add the lower spring

Now add the expander with the cable attached

Insert the little spring loaded clips that go through the the backplate. Open the shoes with a big flat blade and push the expander into place

Well done if you noticed I have the shoes the wrong way round here. The end with the narrow cutout should be for the expander and the end with the wider cutout is for the adjuster. So I had to redo this but I'm not showing you that as I like to pretend that didn't happen.

We are now ready to mount the whole thing onto the rear suspension and start dealing with camber angles.

Rear Differential

Heavy bugger this.
First it needs to be cleaned. I strung it up between a pair of step ladders. Put a bin underneath and scrubbed with Gunk and hot soapy water until at least most of the oily grime was removed.

Of course, I had gunge and smelly Gunk everywhere, water all over the floor.
There has to be more to life than this. Called the whole thing to a halt and went off to the Ripley Classic Car show.
Where I happened to meet Peter who runs a metal cleaning business just up the road called Bare Metal
Or he did. Peter is from Down Under and was once ensconced in North Yorkshire. He has now moved back to Oz so we need to find someone else who provides a similar service. Anyway, after discussing how rubbish all the metal cleaning products on the market are I resolved to throw all my dirty corroded bits in the back of the car and deposit them on his door step.
A few days later the Diff came back looking like this:

I swear, if I ever do this again, I will just dismantle the Jag donor parts, take them to Peter, or someone similar, collect a while later and all that is left is to get artistic with the paint brush. But not the ally parts. They look fine as they are and just need some corrosion inhibitor. And the stuff for that is ACF50. Google it.

Now, this will cost. But allowing for all I have spent on useless cleaners and degreasers, and the time and mess trying to clean the parts myself, it has to be worthwhile.
There is another added bonus which will thrill and delight but that will be in the text for the rear hub recon.

So, off with the rear cover and check the internals. I had a local garage look at the Diff, they said it seemed in good condition with no discernible play or roughness. I checked it had all its own teeth and last thing is to check the backlash.

The spec for backlash of the main gear wheel seems to be a closely guarded secret known only to a Jag Diff Reconditioning cult of worshippers. That or I'm crap at Goggle searching. Measured it anyway with a DTI gauge and got a reading of < 0.02mm in four different locations around the wheel. That is really small. What specs I could find for other Diffs mention 6-10 thou.

So, all done, clean the mating surface, a line or two of RTV instant gasket and the cover goes on with new spring washers.

I thought I would do something other than paint it black. Everything else is black. It's starting to sound like a Rolling Stones track. So I got me some POR 15 engine enamel in Cadillac Dark Blue.
I did paint the drive shaft hubs black though, and with the ally rear cover gleaming after a dousing of ACF50 it is looking smart enough to take on a date.

To make this a one man job, I made a little platform bolted to the hydraulic jack.

Naturally the thing doesn't fit the chassis. Close, but no cigar, until we modify things a bit.
First had to cut 3mm  from the edge of the washer/spacers so the hole would line up on the diff casting. Then shave 3mm from the edges of the upper rear mounting plate on the chassis. I expect Jag used different diffs through the years. Apparently there is a Salisbury diff and a DANA diff, I guess the castings are slightly different. Finally the four holes in the front plate where the diff node goes in are only just wide enough for the mounting bolts. There is no play or tolerance at all, and of course only one hole aligned correctly to get the bolt started on the thread. The other three had to be drilled out an extra 2mm and then routed with a round file. In the end I could get all four bolts started with finger pressure.

Finally after a lot of jiggling I decided to get back to fitting the diff. And it is now in place.

Notice the input hub is off centre to the centre line of the chassis. So the prop shaft is not going to be a straight line. More transmission loss from the flywheel. Lucky we got lots of power to start with.

Cleaned copper grease from the threads, the nyloc nuts are not where you want grease.
Torque settings:
Four small nose bolts: 30lb/ft
Large upper front nuts: 55 lb/ft
Rear upper bolts: 45 lb/ft