This Ain't Rocket Science

Finally getting to the front end, which was my assigned task immediately following the great wishbone thrash. A couple things kept me from getting to this, but I'm not making excuses. I got the little bits taken care of (spindle work, bearings, and brake parts) and today I did the needlessly-feared grinding work on the front inside wheel bearings.

As you can see in the pictures below, to fit Ford F1 brakes on the early Ford (in my case, '42-'48) spindles you have to grind the inside surface of the wheel bearing so it fits snug up against the spindle, but without binding. (In simple terms, the bearing face is square, and the spindle is curved, so I had to grind a curve in the bearing.)

Spindle

Note curved surface

Bearings: stock and ground

Hub mounted

Unfortunately, when I replaced the bearing races in the hub several sessions ago, I replaced the worn F1 outside races with early Ford, because I read they're supposed to be the same. Not! The early Ford is deeper, which I thought would just push my hub dust cap out further, which I ground to fit. However, since the race is deeper, I can't properly seat the locking nut on the outside of the spindle, so tomorrow I'm going to the bearing house again to get the proper races, knock these out and replace them, which should allow me to tighten those bolts correctly.

Anyway, let's get to the title of this post: this grinding work was totally easy - a no-brainer. I was so worried about it. My Okie machinist friend said, essentially, 'it ain't rocket science,' and he was right. Just took an 80 grit sanding drum on the grinder and away I went. And, like he said, it didn't need to be perfect (although I tried) since the inside surface of the bearing keeps it square to the spindle, not the face.

The next part I did (after rinsing out the bearings) was packing them with grease. Yeah, this wasn't rocket science either, but I'd never done that before, and it looked it by the time I was done. Either the grease gun/bearing packet tool from the auto parts store wasn't designed to work with tapered bearings, or I just didn't know what I was doing. Probably a combination of both. So I gave up and just hand-packed them, which was a delightfully lovely greasy mess, but they got plenty of grease.

Finally, I had a little time left before going to dinner, so I started laying out my front brake components, as you can see below.

I'll complete the front brakes tomorrow. (Also, after I pick up four little hold-downs, probably a couple bucks' worth of parts, because I got too few when I was at the brake place; duh).

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