John S's Journal

Now that the engine and gearbox are back in and there’s some weight up front, it was time to go over every nut and bolt and torque everything up.
Started the process with the tires on the skates and that was proving to be a pain. Switched to jacking one side at a time under the spring pan, removing the wheel and placing a jack stand under the frame rail for safety and torquing everything down.

I was cruising along until I got to the lower trunnion. The kits that I purchased had the bolt, distance tube, castle nut, thrust washer, seal support, seal and cotter pin. After torquing to 45#, the cotter pin hole was nowhere close to the slot in the nut. I compared everything that I had removed and bagged with the new parts and could see no difference. I thought maybe I had either screwed something up or perhaps the distance tube was too short so I took everything off and did some measuring. Couldn’t find any issues so a quick post to the forum and a few helpful members thought the castle nut was too short which would make sense. What didn’t make sense is that all of the old pieces were in a ziplock bag and matched the new. I saved just about every nut and bolt that I removed from my wrecked and parted ‘70 roadster so a quick look through the jar of extras revealed 2 of the taller castle nuts. The shorter ones are used on the inner wishbone pivots so one of the PO’s used the incorrect nuts and the new kits were supplied with the incorrect ones as well. Confused the hell out of me. This was discovered on Wednesday
and after an email to the supplier, I got a reply and a promise of two of the correct castle nuts which are arriving Saturday. In the meantime the used ones are on so that I could put the car back down on the skates and move the car over to the other side of the garage and get the MINI back in the garage. Still need to put all of the cotter pins in on all of the castle nuts but for all intents and purposes, the front end rebuild is complete.

A long way to go yet before it’s ready for the road. Next up is to get it up in the air high enough to get the new Bell exhaust in, fit the crossmember to the OD gearbox, bolt up the prop shaft and the rest of the stuff underneath the car. HS4’s need a rebuild and I’ve got a couple of Curto’s kits for that. No lack of things to do but a camping trip is coming up so all of that is going to wait.