Restoring Ham's '48 Wills 2WD; Progress - and we dodged a bullet this week!
A lot more little bits and pieces got done over the past week. Painting continued - fenders, grill, miscellaneous plates, steps are done and in plastic ready to go on. Hubs, brake drums and brake backing plates are done - ready to start putting brake parts on backing plates. The goal is to get a rolling chassis, mount the cab - then start finish work on the bed. The flywheel is back from the machine shop, and the clutch parts are here. We don't need the motor yet, so it stays at the machine shop.
Well, this week we had one of those moments where you get a sheen of sweat on your brow, your knees go weak and you want to check your undergarments. The differential and rear axle on the truck aren't the originals - I replaced the original read-end about 1973 or 1974 after a catastrophic bearing failure. The replacement rear-end was opened up, cleaned out very well and several questionable bearings were replaced. So, it really only had a year or so of use before the truck went into hibernation - or suspended animation. Now, when you start a job like this, there is an urge to take a little shortcut or two - after all the rear-end was "almost new". But, we knew there was probably some rust and corrosion in there, so we decided to open up for a quick cleanout. Well, when we opened it up - not only did it need a cleaning - we found one of those Oh-s#**things that could have ended the whole job had we not done things right.
The carrier is secured to the ring gear by 8 bolts, which in turn are safety wired in place. As you can note in the picture, the head has sheared off of one of the bolts, being held in place only by the safety wire. In addition, the safety wire, which we assume would normally be twisted together at the end, isn't secured - it looks like a piece of the wire is missing. Had we not caught this, the bolt head could have fallen into the ring gear, destroying it and the pinion. Timken rear-ends are rare - replacing this one would have been another major repair!
We had already decided to open up the transmission and look for interesting things in it. That was a great decision - maybe we'll just find dirt, grease and old seals.
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