Friday 22 June 2007

Problem resolved.

New bolts arrived today and Im glad to say they fit perfectly! So thats its I can now carry on and shim up the discs which judging by my initial look are going to need a few shims to center them up.

Again many thanks to Ed for sorting this one out.

Thursday 21 June 2007

Calipers cause confusion....

Finally made it up to the garage last night with good intentions of fitting the calipers and shimming the rear brake discs.

However as always things conspired against me and I didn't get half of what I wanted done. I did manage to temp fit the rear discs with no shims.

However when trying to fit the caliper bolts through the problem occurred.

This is as far as the bolt goes in, in fact I gave it a little tap with my hammer and that jammed it in solid! Luckily I was able to get it out with the press but if I didn't have that it could have gotten nasty!

I managed to fish out on of my old bolts and when compared you can see a difference.

By measurement the new bolt is 11.16mm in diameter vs 10.8 for the old bolt. The hole in the caliper is around 11mm.

The old bolt fits OK in 3 of the 4 holes in the caliper but still does not quite fit in one.

A few emails to Ed at Wards and a quick conversation today and I am informed that Jaguar used 2 suppliers for their calipers for a while, this one used a slightly smaller bolt hole. Jag, in their wisdom, only have one part number for the two different bolts required. Ed is going to send me some new bolts to try.

Ill let you know how it goes!

Sunday 3 June 2007

Now for something a bit diff..erent!!

One of those frustrating days on Tuesday where me and the old man spent all day in the garage and didn't really have anything to show for it. Basically fitting the diff to the chassis did not yield the results I anticipated. I fitted the diff but the brackets would not line up nicely.


So after a quick call to Andy at GD who said I was doing it all wrong, and a subsequent chat with Simon (fellow GD builder) I decided to abandon initial diff fitting and build the rear axle up off of car.

Once built up the assembly is fitted and the chassis may need to be helped to fit with a sturdy bar!

With the diff now placed at a more workable height on my temporary bench I was able to trial fit the jag pivot brackets to the diff without shims. This showed me that the rear GD diff bracket fitted perfectly but the front one did not.

I tried 5 thou shims one each side which improved the front fit but it would still not go on. Eventually 10 thou on each side enabled the front bracket to fit but now the rear bracket wont go on.

10 thou worth of shim's


A bit more shim fiddling and Ive wound up with 12 thou on each side at the front and 7 thou on each side at the rear, most importantly both brackets fit and the shafts turn relatively freely.

The thinking being that the GD brackets have been drilled to suit the original jag shims, so that should have set my carrier brackets somewhere close. Next thing to do is to fit the discs and calipers setting their shims as I go. I can then fit the lower arms, hubs and drive shafts and sort hub camber. Once all this is done Ill probably drop the calipers off whilst I set up the rear toe in and thrust on car. Once all is set Ill remove the assembly, refit the calipers, lock wire the carrier bracket bolts and caliper bolts ready for final installation.

Hub sorted.

Major thanks to Ed at Wards. Despite Citylinks best efforts at delaying delivery and not ringing my door bell I now have a replacement hub which does not wobble about! Ed was great about it, especially given that it was 2005 that I originally took delivery.