[Big D]

Hi all,

I have the M8 on its axles now. Once I completed the final touches on the rear and intermediate axles, I positioned them behind the hull and got one of the guys in the engineering workshop to bring the crane truck through. We opted to lift the rear of the hull first and get the rear and intermediate axles in place first, before lifting the front of the hull off its blocks and putting the front wheels on. It all went pretty smoothly but it was still about 2 hours work by the time I dealt with positioning the axles and fitting the torque rods to hold them in place. Thanks to Willy and Reg, I found that I could use two of the tie rod ends for the adjustable torque rods that were already on the rear axle. There was enough movement everywhere to allow me to fit the adjustable rods to those ends and secure the other end on its pin.

I feel like I’ve reached another milestone with the restoration in getting it to this stage, and it is a good feeling to see it on wheels. I still have some work to do though in setting up the torque rods. One of the fixed torque rods I had (not an original) seems to have a slightly bigger diameter pin on the ends and it won't seat properly in the hole on the trunnion or in the axle, so I think I will need to find an original. I also ran out of time to tidy up the threads on the torque rod mounting pins before the truck arrived, so I still need to find a 1 1/4-12 die nut and tidy the threads up.

Out of interest, what type and capacity of jack do the M8 and M20 owners use to lift an axle and remove a wheel?

I need to get some more of the 7/16” axle stud adaptors as shown in the photo. These align the internal axle in the hub and are described as adaptors in the manual. I would have called them collets, but can anyone point me to a supplier for these? I see they are on EBay as part of modern commercial wheel stud kits but I haven’t found them sold seperately yet.

Before putting the M8 on its axles, I took the opportunity to put some of the paint stencils on. It was a good height to work from without the wheels on. I used water based flat white paint and applied it with a roller. The markings came out really well and I’m very pleased with them. The only issue I had was trying to keep the star decal on the front straight as it went over the two raised strips of steel that go across the front of the hull. I found the best way to deal with that was to cut the decal in a couple of places to get it to go evenly over those steel strips, and then cover the cut with some bits of masking tape. I got the odd bit of paint bleeding through in those areas, but that scraped off nice and easy. These were good paint stencils and I had good support from Tony, the supplier.

That is all for this week.