Yesterday Mike and I went to Walt's to work on the front spindles. I had previously bought all new bearings, bushings, shims and seals for the front end but didn't have the drivers to press the old ones out and the new ones in. I also needed the reamers to fit the new king pin bushings in the spindles. Walt agreed to let us use his tools and watched us to be sure we did it right. So we first pressed out the old bushings in the spindles and removed the old grease fittings, then pressed in the new upper and lower bushing in each side. That was the easy part. Next we used a fixed reamer to align the two bushings and start the reaming. This left the bushings too tight to fit the king pins so we switched to an adjustable reamer and slowly removed a tiny amount at a time until the pins would tightly fit one end or the other but not both bushings at once. Then we switched to a hone and did the final fit with that. We got an exceptional fit on the kingpins but it took several hours.
Front suspension.
Left spindle.
Right spindle.
Today I installed the spindles to the axle with new spindle bolt bearings, shims, and seals, along with the brake actuator arm and levers. Then I installed the wedge pins and nuts that hold the king pin in the axle. Next I torqued all the nuts to specs and put cotter pins and everything to keep it in place. Then I installed new grease fittings and gave it a grease job. Unfortunately someone had painted all these parts previously so the rebuild really ruined the paint. I will re-paint later after all the mechanical work is done . Last week I had welded up all the balls on the spindles that connects the steering arms and ground them round again. You can see one coated in red grease in one of the pictures.
Round steering ball.
All that is left on the front end is to install the backing plates for the brakes and install the drums and wheels. Then I'll remove the rear spring and differential and rebuild them. SS
Front end.
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