John S's Journal

The wrecked Tourer has moved out of the garage and parts have been staged on a table for clean up and to get ready to sell or scrap. Lots of bits have been sold and shipped off to new homes with more to come. The car is now down to bare bones. The tub, doors, and boot lid remain along with the suspension. Pretty much decided to take it all the way down and scrap the tub. No interest from anyone on the rolling shell and the windshield is off now and going to a new home tomorrow so it is unlikely that someone would want it in the state it is in and I plan on using the front suspension bits so it is going to remain under the carport for now. The doors and boot lid might be of interest to someone but I’m shifting attention to going through the OD.

Put the GT on skates and moved it over to the other side of the garage and rearranged things to allow the work table to move in behind it.
With that done, the MINI can come back into the other bay and my wife will be happy about that now that the weather has turned.

Started tearing down the OD to assess its condition and replace all o-rings and gaskets. So far everything appears to be in decent shape. I figured out where the third ball belongs. I had removed the oil pump, the relief valve, the solenoid and the OD unit a few months back and was puzzled when I found 3 of the stainless balls. One for the relief, one for the oil pump but couldn’t figure out where the third one belonged until further inspection which happened yesterday. I noticed the cam was spinning freely on the shaft and that made no sense to me whatsoever until I read in the manual that there is supposed to be a ball that fits into the shaft and locks the cam to the shaft. Bingo! The mystery is no longer a mystery.

The next mystery is finding the little dots on the teeth of the gears in the planet carrier...