At last i have finished the chassis all the welding is done and painted with the last coat and it looks really great, I'm really pleased with the result, i have now moved on to reconditioning of parts, I have been doing this and finishing the chassis for the last few weeks but i think its about time i brought the blog up to date.
Below is a picture of the the diff before i started to recondition it i think it is a good picture to show you guys the condition of the parts as i have received them, they are all in this state so you can imagine i have been spending hours stripping parts down and then shot blasting and rebuilding a huge task as I'm sure you can imagine, I got very close to having a few weeks off but with ray`s help we got the jobs done (ray has done all the painting (forgot to take a snap of the boxes after he brought them back i will next week) he has done an ace job they all look really nice.
The diff out the the jag sub frame ,what a job that was.
Diff with brakes removed.
At this stage it occurred to me that this really was a mess but hey ho every cloud has a silver lining right?, but no not this one it was ceased solid, the oil was black really black but at least it had oil i suppose. I will be adding more pictures as i go along but I'm trying to rebuild bits as we need them for the car so i will post more as i go along.
The next stage after all the reconditioning work on the the parts was to start to dry build the car we started with the front just as the manual is written. ( I can t express enough that you should read the distructions at least 3 times)it all seems very simple but there is lots to remember about camber/caster etc etc and what you need to leave loose till the car is finished also make notes every thing you do keep a diary and highlight all the bits you need to go back to.
As you can see from the pictures below we have just dry built the car so far using some old bolts and nuts, because we are building an old kit and we have loads of parts already i felt it was better to see what we had before i went buying A few hundred bolts. but as you can see it all go`s together really well.
in theory we just need to replace the nuts and bolts as needed when we are sure it all fits as we want it too, we can then torque every thing up and then leave it alone.
Replacing bottom ball joints(new sealed units used here don`t even consider fitting the original type these cost £18 a pair its a no brainer)
Shimming out top ball joint assembly(again new type are sealed no need to grease)
Dry built front end
That brings us up to date.
