Was a day or two back that these things I'd been waiting for turned up.
These were hopefully the last things I needed to finally get the nearside wheel on the Invacar reattached to the hub in all four points. Sadly it would be another couple of days before I'd have a chance to get back into the garage.
This morning another little package arrived.
Which will allow me to tidy up the front indicators. Just out of shot is also a couple of oil filters.
Had a brief sidetrack attacking the tape adaptor I've been using in the Jag.
While it worked fine it had a major drawback in that it made a horrendous racket.
The easiest solution I've found for this in most cases is to simply remove the innards from it. Some cassette decks won't work if you do this as they rely on the rotation of the reels to detect the end of each side. This one however doesn't, and will quite happily run without anything inside the tape. So this lot can go in the bin.
This means that I now can listen to music without a horrible clicky squeaky noise in the background.
Back into the garage.
First up, having finally got hold of a couple of oil filters (having thought I had them in stock but discovering 3/4 of the way through the oil change that I was wrong) I could get that fitted and finish the oil change.
I'm going to have to spend some serious time cleaning up in here soon...everything is just covered in paint because I was an idiot and didn't properly mask off the engine bay before doing the paintwork. That's a job for another day.
Speaking of clean though, this is the first time that the oil hasn't turned visibly darker the moment it's poured into the engine - this had been running for a few minutes.
So having spent a good portion of the afternoon putting it off it was back to fighting with the hub.
Even with a good cobalt drill bit drilling into this hub is an absolute nightmare. After the best part of an hour of fighting with the drill and then the tap...
...Yes! For the first time since the start of September the wheel is actually attached at all four points and tightened up properly.
The shonky using-old-wheel-nuts-as-conical-washers arrangement there on the other bolts was only intended to confirm the thread size in the hub and to prove that bolts would work. It's been confirmed that wheel bolts from a Mk I Morris Minor have the correct thread and right sort of conical head, so there are a set of those on the way.
If the hub wasn't such an absolute pain to drill and tap I'd seriously consider using the M12 bolts in all four holes as they're substantially beefier than the 3/8" ones.
As it is I'd not be able to drive it like this anyway as the 3/8" bolts currently in there are too long so they foul on the brake shoes.
Huge step forward though!
Next step will be to pull the wheel and drum off to clean the inevitable swarf from the drilling and tapping operations out of the drum, then once the new bolts arrive we can get back on the road!
...Then we can see A: Which gremlins I've forgotten about in the last nine months, and B: What new gremlins have developed while she has spent nine months sitting dormant in the garage.
This will be a good thing given that the Jag isn't exactly...frugal...on continuous local runs! Van is actually astonishingly frugal around town, but as 3/4 of the places I've been needing to go lately have height barriers so it's not an option!
Looking forward to buzzing around in the Invacar again. Especially as I'd just got the CVT sorted out when the whole wheel stud debacle started.
