A Days Therapy at A Gippsland Health Farm, Hell No.

With editorial acknowledgement to Grant, I have lifted parts of his latest blog posting to review our very satisfying day on the tools, playing with the skeletal remains of Monty, a 1928 Chev Tourer.

A list of jobs had been planned for a couple of weeks and kept the pair of us, and Bella the dog busy for about 9 hours.

Monty is slowly coming back to life, in what I call baby steps, bit by bit, and today's program included the following:

Now where does this go again?

We removed the two rear axles, then the inner axle seals were extracted.  Grant was in his element, cleaning out the axle housings and diff of thick brown sticky oil. Yuk.

The old axle bearings were removed and new ones pressed back on.

New inner axle seals were fitted, in went the axles, new gaskets, felt pads and everything was bolted back together again.

After a BBQ lunch of steak and chips, served in the outdoor dining area, Bella the dog summoned us both back to work. In went the new hand brake inner band, on went the wheel to test, and what do you know, for the first time in about 42 years Monty had something resembling a working brake. Spurred on by our success we then tackled the outer brake bands, the foot brake, and we were in luck again. Monty now had full braking on two of his 4 wheels. After we adjusted the rear brake linkages and a bit more tweaking, the rear brakes were considered as done, bolted up nice and tight.

Here's yours truly pretending to know what he is doing, but more importantly admiring the new brake linings, thanks to Kevin of Dapto.
What about this one Grant, where does it go?

One more battle was planned for the day, the front brake shoes. Wheel bearings were removed, cleaned, repacked with new grease and fitted with new felt seals.

Monty was back on all fours, and a fine rolling chassis he is.

9 hours was spent in the shed and time just flew. We both worked constantly, four hands making easy work out of jobs that are usually very tricky.

We were happy that we completed all we set out to do and as usual here is Monty reviewing the days work, and giving Grant another list of jobs to complete before the next working bee in a few weeks time...

Grant plans to tow Monty over to his sign shop this week to prepare the chassis for painting on the weekend, and says he needs to heat the shed with a wood fire and a big gas heater for a better job on these cold days....

Damn Monty, what an old softy.


PS. I know one thing for sure, its so much easier to install and work on brakes, when you don't have a car body to deal with and get in your way.