Pre trip maintenance

[series guy]

I have been planning on giving the truck a thorough look over before the drive to New York and wanted to remove a shim from each swivel ball as the steering is just a bit loose. All my own doing as I set the preload up lighter than the green bible suggested. Anyway the mood struck me tonight after a run to drop off some scrap steel. After removing a shim from the right front I was just laying under the truck looking things over when I noticed an eighth inch gap between the spring pad and the leaf. I guess I never got around to re torquing the u bolts. So now all eight are torqued and I shall finish a thorough inspection tomorrow. On the plus side it really drove nice on my test drive afterwards.

[Xplitive]

Haha nice! even better when you find some tools you’ve been looking for.
what preload did you have and are shooting for? I’m at 12 lbs and it’s pleasant. Drove a truck a while back that was for sale, it was bicep bursting, white knuckle bad and I was worried that’s what 88s really drove like. Fortunately not.

[series guy]

Well I got to thinking that I sort of over reacted when re shimming the right side as it could be overly tight and compensating for the left side. I removed the L F wheel and disconnected the tie rods and the preload was definitely loose. I wasn’t about to remove the swivel seal so I just set it up until it felt right. Then I revisited the right side and as I figured it was too tight so I re shimmed it until it felt the same as the left and reassembled everything. I took advantage of the Jack time and adjusted the brakes too. I thought it drove nice before but it really drives nice now. The steering is just a wee bit tighter than I would like so I’m hoping it will be perfect with a bit of use before the trip. Heading for the garage now to adjust valves and change oil. I should be ready for the trip after this.

[50 wulf]

Always nice to find and fix a problem you were (or were not :-) looking for!

I am more curious what you torqued the u-bolts to though? I don’t remember seeing this in the green book when I was looking for it. I torqued mine to 40ft lbs and honestly I felt like the chinesium threads were almost at their limits.

Interestingly, there is no specific torque listed on the u-bolts of my MGB. You are just supposed to torque them until the rubber pads between the top and bottom leaves start to swell out. Well that happens at around 8ft lbs. But that seems way, way too low. So I went to 14ft lbs. I’ve never messed with anything that had rubber spacer blocks on the leaves like that.

[series guy]

I just tightened them until they felt tight. I figured that was better than loose.

[loose gravel]

I think they are supposed to be 70ftlbs.

[series guy]

Well it seems like the old truck was just falling apart underneath me. Yesterday I thought that I would run through the valves and then change the oil and filter. All the valves were exactly the same at around .012” so I tightened them down to .010”. The last valve that I adjusted was number 4 intake. I noticed that the retainer was pretty close to the rocker and that I could depress the spring pretty easily. I put air to the cylinder and removed the spring to find a broken split cotter and a very worn inner spring. Not sure what would cause this one valve spring to weaken but I was happy that all the pieces were present. Of all the parts I have valve springs and bits were not were not in the mix so I hit up a buddy who I gave 2 complete engines to a few years back. I pilfered a cylinder head from him and used a spring and retainer and keepers from that head to fix mine. This is where I found that there are at least 2 types of split cotters and they must match the spring retainer. Made me happy that I grabbed the cylinder head instead of just a spring and cotters as the parts were a 20 mile drive. Hopefully this is my last surprise in my pre trip maintenance.

[Xplitive]

Excited to see what the new top speed will be?

[series guy]

I would really like to get it above 80 but it really doesn’t matter that much to me. I had my Series I with the 2.25 up to 83 on the GPS. Just makes for a fun conversation topic.

[Poppy1969]

Hi All. Wanted to add an opinion on the swivel ball setup. The 12lbs is set with the swivel only. Once you add the wiper seal and then the axle and hub the force to move the swivel does change. I setup to the 12lbs swivel only. With the wiper seal added the force increased to 18lbs. Once I installed the axle and hub the force needed increased to 25lbs. I guess be careful if you check the swivel without removing the axle and wiper seal you could be mistakenly loosening your swivel. But this was also my observation so decide for yourself. Also make sure to check the calibration on your fish scale. At Wal mart they had a cheap, mid range and high priced scale. I bought the mid range but when I checked it with a 10lbs weight it was low at 9lbs. Be careful to check this. Cheers. Tom

[Xplitive]

Used one of those digital things for weighting suitcases. Guess we travel more than fish.