Rack off

A good few hours under the Jensen resulted in the steering rack exiting the vehicle.

This is where having the right tools for the job make things immeasurably easier. In this case a good set of heavy duty ball joint scissors. I had to use the breaker bar as well as the ball joints were well and truly locked on. They made one hell of a crack when they popped!

After the ball joints it was fairly easy to undo the lower of the two universal joints on the steering column. The next problem arose with removing the bottom two hoses that connect the rack to the pump. The left one came off easily, the second one not so. The nut would not spin on the hose resulting in the hose rotating in the socket. There was nothing for it but to wait until the rack was more accessible before removing the final hose.

Next the four bolts holding the rack in were removed. As a pointer to how dirty the underside of the car is I couldn't actually see the heads of the left side bolts due to being covered in oil and crud. Once cleaned they came off easily.

To remove the rack I also had to remove the cross member fan bracket to allow more clearance. The rack was then fed out of the passenger side wheel arch until the rack could then be lifted up and out of the engine bay. This was a two person job so the Wife was called from the house to get her hands dirty! She doesn't like the car now!

I could now see why the hose would not come off. The metal end of the hose had been bent which would not allow the nut to spin. Using a persuader it was straightened and the nut then could be easily undone. I will evaluate whether this hose needs replacing later when the rack goes back in.

While dropping the old rack off at Appleyards I discovered that it is possible to refurbish the universal joints of the column so this is another job on the list. The bottom joint is always at angle and is prone to wear so this seems a sensible job to do while the rack is out.

I have given the UJ a quick clean but I will finish the job when fully refurbishing.

One final decision made this weekend is to not put the new rack straight in. I cannot put a brand new part into a car so covered with oil and crud that it will be covered in the first 100 miles. Therefore I have decided to refurbish the front suspension and fully clean up the front end.

Target is to complete this before the summer. Might be a bit optimistic but you can see from the above photo why it's required.

Aaarrgghh - sheered wheel lug

Well work put paid to being able to spend any time whatsoever on the Interceptor over Christmas. A last minute rush project for a customer meant all Christmas in front of the laptop instead of being under the bonnet.

I finally got out into the garage 2 weekends ago to set about the steering. Started with the simple job of jacking the car up and removing the wheels. Well I though it would be simple until disaster struck and I sheered the top off one of the wheel lugs.

Now, I didn't think I was being particularly brutal with it, I was only using a socket on a breaker bar so I was very surprised this happened. Having spoken to few people and doing some research on the internet I think what has happened is that as the lug has been on and off the car many many times over the years and the threads on the stud have spread and finally it locked the lug the last time it was tightened.

As you can see, there is a fair amount of lug left inside the wheel.

Having mused over how to recover this situation for a number of hours I felt the only way really to get the wheel off was to drill the remaining parts of the lug out of the wheel.

Many hours of careful drilling (and drill bits!) later the remaining part of the lug loosened and I was able to remove it. Basically it took 2 weekends to remove the wheel....rubbish. Admittedly I got very frustrated at various times and headed back into the house to do something else to avoid causing more damage to the car in a fit of anger. Oh well, it's all character building and I can now get on with the real job of removing the rack.