Restoration Diary

27th February 2002 to 13th March

Well, we've come to a bit of a milestone since the last update - here's what's been going on over the last few weeks:

All the bits we were waiting for arrived, and we managed to have a good stint at working on the car before I had to go away for a week to Europe. Within the space of one evening, we had the other front quarter assembled with a new stub axle to replace our first damaged one. The new disc and hub were put on, with greased up bearings, and the caliper mounted on the front upright. The only real quandary we faced on this side is that the stone guard hit the disc when it was rotated, but it was easy enough to tease it over a little to get the necessary clearance. At the back, our new bearing units arrived, and with yet more exertion and swearing, were mated to the drive shafts with our new UJ's. The units slid into place through the hub carrier, and bolted with the diff outer flanges with high tensile steel bolts. On the outside end of each, bearing unit went over the six studs in the hub carrier, and washer, spring washer and nyloc applied. This was quite difficult for some reason in that they did not want to sit straight against the back plate, and it took progressive tightening of the nuts to move the unit fully back. I put this down to the powder coating on the new bearing units, as after some work, they both went on flush. With both rear sides complete, we gave the shafts a spin to make sure all was well. Something wasn't quite right, however, and it turned out one of the UJ's on the NSR had quite a lot of play in it. We had new UJ's for assembly, but in the vice one of the caps broke apart, so we replaced it with one of the ones we took off the car, as the condition seemed ok. It seems strange that we didn't notice it beforehand, but the cap had a larger internal diameter than the newer ones, hence the play on rotation. Realising we had to replace this, a new UJ was ordered.

The rear brakes themselves were more time consuming than difficult to do, as we had to put the shoes on with the springs in place - definitely a two man job here! They went in eventually and were secured against the back plates with pins and clips. Next to go on were the drums. These were the original drums that were on the car, and as they weren't in too bad a state, we jut gave the outside a lick of paint and on they went. The NSR was fine, and the drum stayed nice and level against the outside of the bearing unit, but the OSR was a right nightmare to do. The drum went on ok over the shoes, but for some reason refused to sit straight against the bearing unit. We removed it and got a wire brush around the inside of the drum to make sure all was well, but still no luck. We even got the wire wheel into the drill and cleaned up both sides well, but even now it doesn't sit quite straight. When both of the small screws are done up tight, the drum still oscillated slightly when spun round. Has anyone come across this, or any ideas on what else might be causing this - most infuriating!!

We decided to crack on all the same, next with our new AVO suspension and new springs, which Adrian had assembled for us. This was straightforward enough, so on to the reconditioned steering rack and shortened and uprated anti-roll bar. Straightforward enough, with the help of our new alloy rack mounting kit, which has been strongly recommended by everyone we have spoken to on the subject - Makes fitting a doddle too! We had to think a bit about the best way to get the track rod ends aligned as close as possible to perfect during assembly, and we came up with the idea of counting the number of complete turns the short piece of column we attached took to go from lock to lock. We found the center point, and screwed the track rod ends on to the end of the rack assembly. With a little tweaking, the nuts were tightened to the correct torque.

The anti-roll bar was more difficult however! The bolts into the ends had been replaced by allen bolts, and the bar itself had been shortened, which meant the fixings to the lower wishbones came out of the front instead of the back. We initially made the mistake of fixing the bar to the chassis at the two center points, then trying to fit the drop links and the new allen bolts, but this turned out to be really tight, so we attached the drop links, then fixed them to the lower wishbones before fixing the center mounts. Doing up the nuts on the center mounts really difficult - whoever designed this  part of the M chassis must have had really small hands to be able to get the nuts on and tightened!

Finally, with all steering and braking in place, it was time to put the road wheels back on and lower the entire chassis onto the ground. It took a little while to clear everything around the chassis, but eventually took away the axle stands and dropped it down. Adrian had advised us not to tighten the suspension and wishbone bolts until the car was in its normal 'under strain' position, as the force of lowering the car onto tightened bushes would cause them damage. To try and simulate normal weight on the car, both Chris and I stood on the chassis to tighten all the bolts up - quite an interesting task from up in the air! Once this was complete, the moment of truth was with us - we pushed the rolling chassis out onto the driveway! it may have been persisting down at the time, but it had to be done, and an awesome sight it was too! I know there are lots of pictures of this moment on this page, but it was worth it!!

So, another milestone under our belt - next to come are more brake pipes and the fuel pipe from the rear, and over this weekend we're hoping to get the now nice and shiny exhaust system back onto the car. Next Friday we're taking the engine to a local engine builder to get reassembled, together with out new John Wade bits which arrived recently. Getting close now!!