My Vans

Progress with little Bert

I'm always on the lookout for more Bedford Rascal vans in particular - see here.

Refurbishing the rear axle - including replacing the rear wheel bearings.

I have stolen the axle from project SuperZuki to fit into Bert because his axle whines a lot at high speed when you lift off the throttle. While the problem only really needs the diff swapped to solve the issue I have decided to go the full hog and swap the whole axle. The benefit of doing this will allow me to totally refurbish the axle and have it powder coated in black. Basically the plan is to have the van looking as good underneath as it does above!

I started off by removing the axle from SuperZuki and stripping it right down to the component parts, axle tube, diff assembly and half shafts.

Above you can see the stripped axle tube - nothing left on it at all. All brake lines have been removed with the intention of replacing them with brand new copper pipes and fittings when I get the axle back from powder coating. I've been told that it would be best to get the axle tube soda blasted rather than sand blasted to stop the grit getting inside it and possibly ruining the diff again.

When you take out the half shaft units the rear wheel bearing prevents the brake back plate from being removed from the half shaft. I want to get the back plates sand blasted and powder coated black just like the rear axle. I took the half shafts to four local mechanics with the hope that they would be able to remove the wheel bearings from the half shafts for me but none of them had the "special tool" necessary to do the job.

After reading the Haynes manual procedure on how to take the bearings off I decided to have a crack at the job myself.

First of all you need to remove the collar holding the bearing in place. In the Haynes manual it says you need to grind the collar flat on the top and the bottom in order to remove it but I found that it only needed ground down at the top and the heat built up during this procedure allowed the collar to be removed quite easily.

Here's the collar ground down:

After grinding the collar down I found it best to knock it around the half shaft with a cold chisel to loosen it up - with the heat built up during the grinding procedure this should be easy enough. Be careful not to damage the half shaft as best you can.

After the bearing collar is free to slide around the half shaft I found that if you put the chisel between the bearing and the collar (as shown below) and give it a gentle tap the collar "pops" away from the bearing and off the raised part of the shaft.

You can see from the photos above the bearing prevents the brake back plate from being removed. So the bearings need to be pulled off the shaft in order to get the back plates off. I want to get the back plates sand blasted and powder coated so this was necessary.

I tried looking on ebay for such a tool but nothing seemed to be available. A slide hammer bearing puller may have worked but I read somewhere that there is an immense pressure used to press these bearings onto the shaft so I assume a "special tool" is required.

I studied the picture in the Haynes manual of the bearing puller and decided to make up my own pulling tool. It's made up of two pieces of angle iron, some lengths of steel tube, a 10mm plate for the top, bottle jack and 10mm threaded bar. Cost me £6 in total - well worth every penny. Here it is in all it's glory after about an hour and a half of fabrication (ignore the manufacturing mess in the backround!!):

And here's the business end of the puller. I welded the four small round tubes onto the angle iron to try and prevent them from twisting downwards when the pressure is applied on the tool. It worked perfectly with minimal effort and didn't damage the half shaft at all. Of course if you have a workshop press I'm sure you could press the bearing off the shaft using a similar setup to hold the bearing in place while pressing the shaft downwards.

And here's the half shafts completely dismantled with the brake back plates seperated from the axle ready for blasting and powder coating:

I've got quite a collection of parts to go to the blasters so I'll have to leave them all in as soon as possible.