Front Axle assembly.

Now it was time to seriously start bolt bits on and begin to make this look like it might be a car one day.
Up the front the Jag lower arm was readied for installation, I trial fitted the lower pivot shaft and found that, as was stated in the GD build notes, my new shaft was slightly over on OD due to the plating. With the shaft clamped in my press it was the work of a few minutes to reduce the OD with a bit of abrasive pad.

The chassis tube and pivot shaft was well greased, the lower wishbone was offered up to the chassis and persuaded to fit with the thrust washers between the chassis and bushes in the lower arm.

With the shaft knocked through (not all the way or you wont get the nut on!) I could fit the washer and nut and tap through to complete. The nut was tightened and the split pin inserted and bent to lock the nut in place. It does not matter with the powerflex bushes where the lower arm is when the nut is tightened but if you are using direct replacement Jag bushes the lower arm must be horizontal to prevent the bushes from tearing.

With the lower arm in place The upper arm came next. A small issue was found here, as assembled the pivot bracket would not fit to the chassis. The inner thrust washer was fouling on the mounting plate. So I disassembled both sides and swapped the pivot shafts over and eventually I managed to get a combination that would fit without having to take a file to the chassis!

With a pair of new bolts (not supplied in the GD bolt kit!) and additional washers front and back I bolted up the top pivot shaft, note the main pivot shaft nyloc's are left loose at this stage.


I'm not sure I have enough thread protrusion on the rear of these bolts for Mr SVA, only time will tell.

Next I fitted the shock unit, you can leave this out if you are going to set your geometry now but as I have a bit of time before I come to that task I decided to fit the shock such that the front assy. was self supporting.

Simple really, just use two bolts, two nuts and 4 washers.

To finish off this side the final bit to fit was the upright assembly. This is a heavy part to lift into place and fiddle around locating ball joints!


From the back..


And a closer shot of the front..

One point of note, it is not possible to get a socket and torque wrench on to the bottom ball joint nut once the top ball joint is located. Well not with my torque wrench anyway!

The same sequence was repeated on the other side except I tightened the lower ball joint nut before I located the upper joint into the upright. Took a bit of balancing of the hub on my jack, oh and a support strap in case it slipped off the jack, but the job was done.


Next up the steering rack.....

Rigid fuel line.

Flushed with success of the brake lines I moved swiftly on to tackle the rigid fuel line.

This, like the brake pipes, comes coiled up from GD so first off I had to carefully straighten the pipe. All apart from the pre formed 90° bend at the front!

The pipe is then mounted to the top rail of the chassis on the opposite side to the rear brake line.


At the back Ive yet to fix the pipe finally in place as Ive run out of P clips but it exits about here (I think!)

(Please excuse the pile of rubbish in the background!)

So thats that, the fuel line is in.

Rear Brake pipe.

Happy that the front pipes were in I moved on to the back pipes. At this point I was glad I had the chassis up on stands as high as I could get it as there was a lot of laying on your back working underneath the chassis.

First off I fixed the rear T splitter to the location supplied by GD.

Then from here I started to form the bends and work backwards. If you asked me now I may say that this was not such a good move as trying to manipulate such a long piece of pipe was not easy.
Well in the end after a fair bit of effort the pipe was fixed to the chassis and up to the mounting block at the front. I cant say Im happy about the distorted nature of this bend and its yet to be understood if it will foul on any part of the drivetrain.

So thats it apart from the small link pipes back to the rear calipers from the T splitter. I will cover those once the rear axle is in place.

The Chassis Build Begins.

After a bit of a 4 month break from doing anything in the garage I thought I ought to press on.

First off I removed the radiator bar and tunnel top sheet to give better access to the chassis, also with the radiator bar removed it gave me a bit more room at the front of the garage.

Rust protecting the inside of the chassis.
The next job was to coat the insides of the chassis tubes with waxoil or similar, I chose Dinitrol ML cavity wax in 500ml aerosol cans instead of using a compressed air driven applicator. I ordered two but only actually needed one to complete the task as you dont want to fill the tubes up, just coat them.

The main advantage of this was that the applicator nozzle was exactly the right size to fit in through the chassis mount holes. All the chassis mounts were removed one at a time and the chassis tubes coated in sections.

Brake Pipes.
At this point I made my first of I’m sure many breaks with the normal build procedure. I decided to do my brake and fuel lines next because my running gear was not yet complete.
Adrian Beaumont, AKA Grease Monkey, very kindly drove up to Swindon to lend me his rivnut gun so that I could fit the brake lines in.

I started with the front T splitter and then started the pipe bending exercise with the front drivers side short link. This did not go too well, as I had the GD pipe kit all the pipes were to the right length and pre terminated, this meant I could not make any mistakes! Soon after getting it wrong I started to get the hang of pipe bending and the link was in.

Next I moved on to do the link across to the other front flexi pipe. This went better.

Next came the link from the T union to the mounting block.

And that’s it, the front brake lines are in.