My first carrier: some assembly required

[super dave]

Now that was accomplished it was time to get on the assembly of the suspension. I opted to bolt the main parts on and then install the springs after as it would be to heavy to install a complete component. I stripped the system a few years ago with a home built spring compressor at the time but really did not like it and considered making one from the Australian designed one but I made up one using a M113 track jack and it has worked flawless

[super dave]

Now that that has been done it was time to install all of the road wheels. As in one of the past posts I went for the larger wheel bearings and had spacers and sleeves made to install them into the wheels and the measurements that I got were spot on and the wheels slid into place perfectly


I will leave for a brief while and go work on it and will post some more info tonight.

[kevin powles]

Hi, Nice Progress, well done.

[super dave]

Thanks, Its been a long road and looking forward to the end result

[super dave]

After I got the suspension on and all buttoned up, I was just looking at the road wheels from front to back from the rear and noticed that the front adjuster wheels looked toed out after looking at it closer and taking a strait edge to it from the hull to the outer edge of the wheel i discovered that the front axles were bent . I had a couple of extras that came with the carrier and I dug them up and swapped them out with the ones I had on. The right side replacement was perfect but the left side was the same as the one I had on it. As the left side was not as bad as the right I just went ahead and made a small shim at the rear bottom of the adjustment and it came out pretty good


The next part I started to work on was the conduit as I thought I would get that out of my way. As the conduit that came with the carrier was very rusty (like through) I was lucky to do a trade with Dave in Saskatchewan with a lot better stuff. The removal of the older smaller wire was pretty easy, but the starter cable that went to the starter was rusted/stuck to the inside of the conduit . I first tried to remove the cable buy clamping the conduit in the vice a hooking a come along to the cable and pulling it out with a lot of effort which it did come but it left all of the rubber shielding still attached to the conduit, Long story short I had to cut the conduit in half so I could access it to remove the shielding. Now that was done it just needed a clean up YAY. I was missing all of the rear conduit from the transmission back so luckily a friend of Doug's has a MK1 and had that piece of conduit that we could borrow to make one for ourselves. I was lucky I had a friend with a Hausfeld tubing bender that made quick work of that and just have to thread the ends. Had to make up a few of the sleeves to join the conduit as well as the jam nuts.

[super dave]

After that came Fabrication, fabrication and more fabrication of brackets and all of the fasteners to put this thing together. When I purchased this project I did not get the lid to this giant puzzle that states ( Fabrication a Welding skills are a must when assembling). I am over 743 bolts I had to get together so far of various lengths as well as the different head styles as to get it back to look as original as possible as most of the bolts I had were in very poor to non existent from the years it was under the ground. I used a lot of the stove bolts as they are similar to the dome head bolts of the carrier but when it came to the counter sunk screws ARRR. as the BSF style is about half the head diameter and depth I had to machine all of the down to size and re cut the slot in them which took a lot of time. Also I machined all of the markings on the ends of the bolts so they looked more like the bolts of the time

[super dave]

A few more parts.



Well that's enough for tonight and tomorrow off to the Calgary gun show where I can look at a lot of cool stuff and see what Rob Love has been up to