More refurbishment

Several other builders send their rear hub carriers off to Wards or other refurbishers and I have to admit they do seem to come back looking pristine. I took a leaf out of my old mans book - if you can do it yourself - get on with it!
The first job is to remove the brake disk backing plate and torque plate by removing the four allen screws. The plates were fairly well corroded onto the carrier but a dose of WD-40 did the trick.
The thinner disk splash shield can be discarded.
The next operation is to drift out the wheel bearing races and the fulcrum races. The wheel bearing races are easy to remove, just have to be careful not to damage the soft alloy housing. The fulcrum races are a complete pain. There may well be a special puller for removing these but as I didn't have one I had to use a piece of bent rod to drift them out. The problem is the fulcrum tube is narrower than the races so you cant get a straight drift on them. I reckon it took over an hour to get these things out - and there are four of them!
With the carriers now completely stripped I set about cleaning them up with rotary wire brush then a quick coat of aluminium spray paint.

Before and after!

Its then a case of pressing in the new bearing races. A press would be really handy for this but all I had was a hammer! I hit on the idea of using the old bearing races, reversed, to drive in the new races. This plan was working well, right until both the new and old races bound into the hub...so drifting them out again and back to the drawing board. Then I realised that cutting through the old races with the angle grinder allowed me to spring the old races out when they started to bind. Job done!

Next job was to refurb the torque plates, so wire brushing, degreasing then hammerite was applied. The torque plate also contains the brake shoe expanders which should be dissasembled and regreased. Lots of small parts in here so need to make sure they don't get lost. There is a good image in the build manual to help with reassembly.

I managed to obtain a new set of brake shoe retainers and springs from Jaguar Heritage and remembered to insert the retaining pins before refitting the torque plates.
I decided that now would be a good time to fit the brake shoes and springs on the bench rather than on the car - saves your back and a lot easier to see whats going on.

So at the end of all this I had two refurbished hub carriers - looking pretty smart too. However I'd say with the cost of parts, you don't save very much by doing this job yourself.

The next bit of refurbishment was the front hubs which required new bearings. These were reasonably easy to drift out, then used the old bearing races suitably slotted to press in the new bearings. I had an issue with the bearing kits - I ordered them from British Parts - JLM1707. The issue was that, while the part number is correct, the bearings supplied are not to Jaguar specification. The inner and outer bearings are different sizes, however the inner bearings were too small. The bearings were branded PowerTune and on investigation it looked like the kits which come as an inner, outer bearing plus a grease seal - were incorrectly assembled. I contacted BritishParts who didn't believe there could be a problem but nevertheless refunded the items but annoyingly not the cost of delivery or my return shipping costs. Very annoying given their faulty parts. I subsequently obtained the same JLM1707 part from Dave Manners, (branded Timken) and funnily enough were a perfect fit!

And finally - the brake calipers. As I live near Worcester, I took them down to Bigg Red for a complete refurb, new seals, pistons etc. The brakes are definitely not something I wanted to DIY and I was particularly keen on the pressure test service. Bigg Red will do various finishes and colours, however as the boss hadn't decided on colour scheme I just had them painted silver. Have to say BiggRed did a great job and not a bad price either. I've subsequently painted them with Hamerite to create a better and more durable finish.