Hey friends, nothing too exciting but something I've been putting off. Left steering was very weak, until the diff. heats up a bit. My fault since I didn't tighten them up enough when I had the entire differential out last winter and disassembled to fix another issue. Waiting for the weather to be more painting-conducive so decided to tackle this while our heat wave has abated a bit.
Hoisted up the rear of the Imp using my engine hoist and chain attached to the hitch pintle, then crawled under to place some jack stands on the frame between the tracks to hold the weight. Then a floor jack to support and lower the differential to remove the inspection plate. (Note: using the engine hoist gave me much better access when crawling underneath to place the jack stands and loosen the front pillow block).
The rest was standard procedure. I managed to get an additional 1.5 turns on the internal adjusters (540 degrees rotation, as tight as I could get them and just a tad more than the recommended 2 13/16" center-to-center of the mounting pins), resulting in the external actuating arms being straight up perpendicular to the ground when lightly tensioned and then slightly backed off for some free play. The only drawback is that I can't yet test it...since I've removed the gas tank in prep for painting. One less thing to do.
And...something I didn't know until reinstalling the diff. late last fall to discover that the top two bolt holes on the inspection plate are stripped. So...just load them up with gasket sealer at this point (of course they're the only 2 through holes, the rest being blind holes). Would require complete removal of the C4 to fix with a heli coil, etc. and I dread removing the tracks to do that. Yeah, they're part of the mounting for the slave cylinder bracket assembly but don't really see any torque per se. In the immortal words of Rossane Rossanadana of Saturday Night Live, "its always something"
Hoisted up the rear of the Imp using my engine hoist and chain attached to the hitch pintle, then crawled under to place some jack stands on the frame between the tracks to hold the weight. Then a floor jack to support and lower the differential to remove the inspection plate. (Note: using the engine hoist gave me much better access when crawling underneath to place the jack stands and loosen the front pillow block).
The rest was standard procedure. I managed to get an additional 1.5 turns on the internal adjusters (540 degrees rotation, as tight as I could get them and just a tad more than the recommended 2 13/16" center-to-center of the mounting pins), resulting in the external actuating arms being straight up perpendicular to the ground when lightly tensioned and then slightly backed off for some free play. The only drawback is that I can't yet test it...since I've removed the gas tank in prep for painting. One less thing to do.
And...something I didn't know until reinstalling the diff. late last fall to discover that the top two bolt holes on the inspection plate are stripped. So...just load them up with gasket sealer at this point (of course they're the only 2 through holes, the rest being blind holes). Would require complete removal of the C4 to fix with a heli coil, etc. and I dread removing the tracks to do that. Yeah, they're part of the mounting for the slave cylinder bracket assembly but don't really see any torque per se. In the immortal words of Rossane Rossanadana of Saturday Night Live, "its always something"