Today, I pressed the new axle bearings that I had ordered from Sunbeam Specialties onto the axle shafts. Rick also supplied a new seal cover to replace the one that I had destroyed while I was pressing the old bearings and hubs off of the shafts. After a quick shot of chasis black paint, the hubs, seal covers and axle shafts were ready to install onto the axle housing.

Love those shiney new fasteners

Well after spending that last few days trying to locate shim stock to adjust the rear axle pinion height, I finally hit pay dirt. The king pin shims for an I-beam axle ford are the same inner and outer diameter as the Rapier pinion bearings. I added .010″ to the shim stack and nail’d the gear pattern first time. Happy days!!!

After I rolled the pattern, I installed the third in the freshly painted axle housing and added some shiney new fasteners.

Today, I picked up the axle and third member housings that I had dropped off at the sandblasters earlier in the week. The third member housing was in excellent condition, but the axle housing was a bit worse for wear. The leaf spring perch welds on both perches had developed several cracks. I re-welded the perches, and spot welded any additional pin holes that I found in the housing.

After all of the welding was completed, I added a Land Rover axle tube vent to the top of the housing. The original breather was simply an 1/8″ hole drilled in the top of the housing, which I thought was kinda hokie. I drilled and tapped a hole for the new breather assembly. The banjo bolt and vent was off of a spare Land Rover Discovery axle housing that I had in my shop. Now, I can route a vent tube across the axle tube and up towards the fuel tank. This should keep the breather nice and clean.

I primed and painted the axle and third member housings, and leaf spring mounts with chasis black. I also primed and painted a handful of engine tin with Packard green engine enamel from Kanter Auto.

Once the paint was dry on the third member housing, I test fit the pinion and carrier to check the pinion height. As I had suspected, the pinion was sitting a bit to low and would need to be shimmed up a titch.

A couple of days ago, I posted up a bearing inquiry on the Hillman yahoo group.

hey gang,
I’m currently going through the axle in my rapier series 2 project and
am having difficulty locating the correct bearings. The bearings that
came out of my third member are as follows:

carrier cup: Timken 16284
carrier cone: Timken 16150
pinion cup: SKF K26118S/4/J
pinion cone: SKF K26283S

i ordered what we though were the correct bearings from Rick @ sunbeam
specialties. but the bearings that he sent were not correct.

pinion bearing set: Federal Mogul M88010
carrier bearing set: Federal Mogul LM501310

these bearings are the superseded parts from his parts catalog. his
books also list 2 different pinion bearings. my rapier uses the same
bearing for the inner pinion and the outer.

i put in a call to my local bearing house, and am awaiting his search
results. from what i could find on the net, the timken online catalog
shows he carrier bearings but the pinion doesnt seem to match.
i did find a place in the uk that listed the pinion bearing at 200£
each…could this be right?
$800 for 2 bearings… good god that’s more than i paid for the car, LOL

anyway, thanks again for the help

marc

what I ended up finding was the following:

bearing update for those who care…

i got the bearings from Kaman and this is what i’ve found.

the carrier bearings (16150/16284)were the same as the ones i had.
the only difference was about -.002″ in the race thickness.

the pinion bearings (26118/26283) were about .005″ smaller in inner
diameter than the originals and again the race was about -.002″ in
thickness…

Since the pinion bearing was slightly smaller in diameter than the original bearing, I chose to skim a bit off the pinion gear so the bearing would not be to tight when installed. The results were better than I had hoped for.

More on the Hillman yahoo group bearing thread can be found here.

I spent the morning removing and dismantling the third member from the rear axle. All in all, everything looked ok. The pinion height shims were a little mangled, but the carrier, pinion and ringgear were in great shape. I pulled off the bearings and races and cleaned the remaining bits. Now to start looking for some axle bearings and seals.