Finally finished assemble front running gear today. The largest obstacle is actually lack of clamping mechanism while working on the hub, especially when torquing things down. You will see my various ghetto setups later in this post.
Tools:
Bearing installation kit makes installing bearing race much easier than using drift. It makes sure that race is square in the hub. I picked up a set on Amazon for $26.96.
A 34mm or 1-5/16″ socket depending on the size of the wheel hub nut you are using. The ones that came with my disc brake conversation kit are 34mm. Don’t try to get by with you 1-1/2″ socket. The socket may end up stuck on the nut.
Wheel bearing grease. Again, got mine from Amazon.
Additional balljoint shims. Each ball joint comes with six shims of three different thickness. But I ended up needing more thin shims to fine-tune the preload. So I ordered some extra from MiniMania (part# 2A4242).
You can pretty much follow any shop manual or instructions you may find on Mini Magazine. Just remember that you should use the entire bearing set (including two races, two bearings and a spacer) in a hub. In the set, the bears and the spacer are machined in such way that their combined width meets the tolerance. When installing the seal, pay attention not to push it too far inside so that it rubs the bearing. All you need to do is to make the bearing flush with the hub opening like this photo shows.
Next step is installing the two balljoints. Most shop manual doesn’t mention lapping the balljoints first. But the consensus among online communities is that this should be done before the installation. The balljoints I have got (again as part of the disc brake conversion kit) appears to be of fairly good quality. All I needed to do is lapping a few minutes by hand. This photo shows the difference between with and without lapping.
The less glossy one is lapped.
Now comes the extremely tedious part of finding the right combination of shims. Haynes manual says that, after shimming, the balljoint should be able to move freely with slightly resistance. However, this sounds too loose based on my experience with working on other cars. A bit googling led me to this 7ent article. It says “It will be about right when you can’t really move the pin around with your bare fingers, but you can still do so with a gloved hand. Then take the thinnest remaining shim out and torque the top cap to around 75 ft. pounds. This should be a tight but correctly-adjusted ball joint“. I tried this, but the end result seems to stiff to me. So what I ended up shooting for is to make it stiff enough so that ti can be used moved using a spanner once torqued to 75 ft-lb. If this approved working fairly well, I will try 7ent’s article next time. The shimming step was probably the most time consuming step of the entire hub assembling. Mainly because the top cap need to be torqued to spec for each trial. It probably took me one hour for each balljoint. I also improves a clamp method so that the torquing can be done. Here the metal piece on top of the hub is a spanner. But you can just use any thick steel bar. Also, don’t forget to top something underneath if you work on a wooden surface. Otherwise you will leave a circular mark.
Finally it’s time to put drive shaft, hub, disc rotor all together. Don’t forget to put the plastic water shield on to cv joint. The groove on the water shield matches that profile of inner bearing seal. If you are not working with the drive shaft connected to the car, this step can be extremely difficult if not impossible, as it requiring torquing the castle nut to more than 150 ft-lb. At the end, I gave up and decided to do this once the drive shaft is installed onto the car.
Next step is rear drum brake and radius arm assembly. Then I will be ready to build a rolling shell. Stay tuned.
Mini From Down Under 