Paint in the neck.

The last few days have largely been taken with painting, and in some cases the repainting, of bits that I need to keep moving forward. However, I did manage to get the front axle in which is a major milestone, but has led to some more painting being needed!

I do tend to flit between jobs to have a change of pace and so decided that as I was getting towards needing to fit the propshafts I would add those to the painting pile. First step was to strip them down. This involved a fair amount of press action and some choice persuassion. The hardest caps to remove were the from the front to the differential. It seems the shaft had rubbed on the saddle so slightly deformed the eyes. It does suggest it wasn’t turning well!

You may wonder why there are three shafts; my D4 decided it was time for a new centre bearing. This is a slightly more complex propshaft.

You may note from the above that one joint (second from right)is a slightly different size and it doesnt have a grease nipple. The other three are GKN so may be original. Needless to say I am replacing with Genuine Parts.

I had tried just to touch up the paint on the fan, but quickly decided I wasn’t happy with it. The solution was to strip it to bare metal (fiddly) then zinc prime, white undercoat and repaint. It now looks much better. The military fan is a thing of beauty.

After a long stretch of painting I had a change of pace and put the front axle in. This is relatively straight forward, bolt springs on and roll under chassis, but lining up the four ends of the springs can be annoying. Inevitably there was some damage to the paint in the process but noting major.

After getting the front axle in I thought I would have a look at the dampers. These were grey (front Girling) and black (rear OEM) and clearly that just wouldn’t do so ….

Next items to be painted were the bump stops. Now on this front the parts books list identical ones all round, but the fronts were extended ones. I understand these are correct for early lightweights, but as mine had them I decided to replace them with these once I had found the part number and tracked them down. The rears are standard.

With the chassis waiting to roll the last step was to paint the rear differential pan for the convoy light to shine upon. In the end I stripped the pan down and started afresh rather than adding layer upon layer of paint. It does look good!

You can probably guess the next jobs!