ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I finally got my Jag back on four wheels, with a successful test 
drive yesterday. I think the catastrophe log goes something like:

* Damn brake disc is stuck on - soaked it in penetrating lubricant, 
tapped the middle with a hammer with increasing ferocity. In the 
end I just took the hub apart with it on, and then hammered at the 
hub nuts (with a block of wood on top to protect them) while the 
disc was suspended on top of two other blocks of wood. Just as it 
started to look hopeless, it suddenly just "plopped" out, as these 
things do.

* Hub nuts are single-use, extremely expensive, need to come from 
the UK, and I didn't buy one before taking the old one off because 
I thought they'd be regular nylock nuts (actually they're "nylstop" 
nut, which survive high temperatures and cost ~$50+ each!!! No 
there really isn't a cheaper supplier, these Jags are about the 
only things that use ones this size, I looked HARD).

* Getting the old bearing races out was as difficult and tedious as 
I remember. I'm afraid I did leave some marks on the bore from the 
punch I was hammering it out with. Will try to cut some scrap brass 
to size and try to use that when I do the other wheel bearing.

* Inner seal from the replacement bearing kit (correct for the car) 
_has_ to be the wrong size. Only a little bit too wide, and it is 
rubber so you'd think it would squeeze in there. But this is HARD 
rubber - I hammered like hell for hours and eventally got it flat 
against the bearing. But it crushed, and I could then reach in and 
just pull it out by hand without any force at all. The old seal 
still looked like new after washing off the old grease in petrol, 
so stuff the warnings - it went back in again.

[two week wait for the new hub nuts to arrive]

* CAN'T GET THAT INNER BEARING ON! It got so far and just stopped. 
Everything else is together and I don't want to get the new grease 
all dirty trying to disassemble it again (a good layer of dust has 
blown into the shed since I swept it out before starting). After 
some more hours it eventually dawned on me that I'd mis-remembered 
the design of the hub shaft and was just hitting it against a 
deliberately raised section of the shaft. This is the problem with 
my little memory slips - confounded by the exploded diagram that I 
printed off from the Jaguar parts website blowing away. I 
eventually looked it up, realised I was trying to put the bearings 
on in the wrong order, and printed out two more copies of that 
diagram. Trying the other bearing (could have sworn IT was the 
slightly smaller one), all goes fine.

* The new outer seal did fit, so all back together. Back everything 
goes - pivot bearings (all freshly cleaned out and greased up), new 
hub nut tightened as much as I could, brake disc, brake caliper, 
wheel. Lowered the car, torqued the hub nut up to the specified 
310Nm(!). Hmm... that wheel looks wonky.

* Next weekend, after umming and ahhing all week, I pull of the 
other wheel and comparre. Clearly the threadded end of the 
differential output shaft isn't sticking out as far as it should be 
- but how? Everything slides through the bearings and got torqued 
up, the splines in the hub are too big to be mis-aligned, how could 
it possibly go together wonky?. I decide I just have to pull it all 
apart again, throw away that new expensive signle-use hub nut, and 
see what's going on. Maybe one of the spacer rings or seals got out 
of position while I was pushing everything together.

* I pulled it all apart, all matched the exploded diagram and 
nothing looked like it had been squashed by 310Nm of force. Put it 
all back together, but with the old nut just to test. Nah, still 
not right.

* Two more disassembly-reassembly cycles and somehow it just went 
together right. All I can think is that it need to be held upright 
while you push the hub in because it swings down from the pivot at 
the bottom, and the natural way to hold it is by hand pressing at 
the top. The last time I was getting lazy and wedged a rubber 
mallet at the bottom to hold it up, so that I had both hands free. 
Somehow it only goes together right when you hold it up from the 
bottom?! Anyway, it worked and the wheel was on nicely, though I 
now had to order a third hub nut to use when I do the other wheeel.

* All excited, I put on the brake disk, wheel, torqed up that nut, 
and set out for a drive. CLUNK! "Oh, umm, did I put the brake 
caliper on again that second time? Nope, it's still loose there, 
rattling around the differential output shaft."

* Back into the shed. Wheel off - hmm it's closed up all the way. 
Can't lever it apart again...

* Needed to change the brake fluid anyway, so messed around trying 
to lever it apart with the bleed screw open, I'd need to have bled 
it out soon anyway. Nope - just bending my screwdriver, that thing 
really won't open up.

* Eventually got out a big 9" G-clamp and tried to push back the 
brake caliper piston using that, by pushing against a steel rod 
that I'd cut to fit in past the outer brake pad. It turns out you 
really can't use a G-clamp on a pin/rod - it always slips out and 
everything falls apart. But while slipping apart one time, it 
pushed out the outer brake pad, so then I could just clamp against 
the inner brake pad directly and then it pushed the piston in 
without much trouble at all (with the bleed screw undone, though 
I'm not sure if that was actually needed)!

* But how did that brake pad go in again? Doesn't seem to fit back 
the way it came out... Next day I read the Haynes manaual (which is 
much more helpful about brake pad changing that rear wheel bearing 
replacement) and even through the design of the calipers was 
clearly quite different for the model used there, I figured it out 
(need to push them in laterally (with the caliper disassembled), 
not vertically). I'd done that before, but too many years ago to 
remember properly.

* My father helped me bleed the brakes on Monday (you need someone 
inside to push the brake pedel). All went well except that the 
new/old brake fluid all seemed too similar in colour and I had a 
hard time spotting when the new stuff was coming out. So I wasted 
more than last time and had to get some more - about a one and a 
half hour round trip. Plus taking off and putting on + torquing all 
four wheels is hard work!

* After all that I washed off the windows (covered in dust by this 
point - it's amazing how quickly the car aquires that "barn find" 
look when I leave it in the shed) and made a second attempt at 
taking it for a test drive. Flat battery. I think I failed to close 
the boot (where I kept all the stuff I didn't want to blow away) 
properly at one point and the boot light stayed on. Then the brake 
boost pump probably wore it down the rest of the way doing the 
brake fluid change. It was parked nose-in, so can't do a jump-start 
(there are enough holes in the shed's rear wall to let the wind 
through, but not quite enough to get a car through, yet)

So yesterday, after a night on the charger, I finally got to take 
it out for a drive. Always tricky for the first few kilometers 
before I get on the tarmac, because it's hard to hear things 
falling apart above all the regular noise from driving on 
slightly-rough gravel. But once onto the black stuff I cautiously 
wound my way up to 100Km/h (and a little beyond - eigh who'se 
watching?) without any of the whinning sounds of complaint that I'd 
been hearing from that wheel before! Success!!

So, umm, one wheel down, one to go then...

I do know some of those mistakes make me sound like a complete 
idiot. Fact is that the longer one of these jobs goes on, and the 
more steps (like attaching the brake caliper) that I have to 
repeat, the more things like short-term memory start to slip, so I 
start to mix up the things that I _do_ understand. Plus I'm usually 
just worn out physically, in this case mainly from hammering. There 
was a _lot_ of hammering. On the other hand I'm guessing that most 
people on Gopher being all computer types probably don't do so much 
as their own oil changes, so maybe it all sounds very clever. Or 
just uninteresting, and I lost everyone on the second paragraph...

Limiting work to weekends also confounds the confusion because I 
can't remember details about what I did a week ago, but I have to 
be strict with myself on that or else I'd be failing as my own 
boss. This week though I decided (possibly in part because I'd got 
a bit burnt out with all that draining work on the weekends) to 
take an early Christmas break, except that I'm still selling stuff, 
but nobody's buying much now anyway given that it won't get 
anywhere in the post over Christmas. Hence I'm babbling to you on a 
Wednesday morning. I'm a little confused actually, because it 
doesn't feel quite like a weekend, yet it's not a working day 
either. I feel like I should be doing something, but I'm wasting 
time on this instead.

Actually to be honest I'm probably most content like this - if I 
really try to do something productive then I just run into all the 
frustrating, often apparantly-unresolvable, problems like I had 
with that wheel bearing replacement. On the other hand if I really 
don't intend to do anything, then after 2-3 hours on the couch 
watching a movie* or reading an old magazine from the 1950s, I end 
up feeling like I _need_ to physically do something, but at the 
same time I don't _want_ to do anything. I'm sure that's not very 
unusual, though some people seem to manage to content themselves 
with doing nothing very well. But somehow when I feel like I want 
to do somthing specific, but I'm not doing it because "I'll just do 
a bit of this first, it can wait", I feel much happier. The bliss 
of procrastination.

 * I finished my epics watchlist last night with Zulu (got a poster
   for that over in the "history snippets" section, by the way). Ben
   Hur certainly lives up to the hype, and I think I would actually
   rate it above Sparticus, which is nevertheless a great film with
   a more "human" story. Zulu is really less in the old hollywood
   epic tradition (British, so not made in Hollywood for one thing),
   which is also a bit of a relief because you need something more
   down to earth after all that glitzy American stuff and its
   self-righteous sub-text. It's just one battle, shown excellently.

   I already started on old James Bond movies in the mean time, so
   that'll be my next theme I suppose. I need to make the most of the
   movies I've got because without the local Op-Shop I haven't had a
   source of new ones coming in for a long time and I've finally
   worked my way through the backlog in my "VHS inbox". I was running
   out of good places to put up more shelves for them anyway though,
   so maybe it's for the best.

 - The Free Thinker