[Etsha6]

I spent the weekend replacing the seals on the front axle of my '86 FJ62.
When replacing the RHS I fitted the felt seal before fastening the top and bottom bearings (steering arm and brace?) and noticed no problems.
When I did the LHS, I left the felt seal for last and when the top and bottom bolts (fastening the steering knuckle bearings) were correctly torqued, there was still about one mm vertical play, ie the steering knuckle moves up and down 1mm relative to the ball end of the axle sleeve.

Is this normal? Surely the felt seal should not be holding the steering knuckle up.

Would it be a disaster to just shim until tight?

Any and all help much appreciated, Thanks

[5280Hawk]

There shouldn't be any play.

Did you replace the Bearing races on the Axle sleeve? Did the Shims go back in the same way they came out?

I just did the re-build and had no play at all.

The felt seal on the back along with the rubber gasket and the split metal ring should just keep out water.

[Etsha6]

Good point, thanks Hawk,

I replaced the races and bearings and used the original shims.
The old races were quite badly scored.

Does this mean I have to get the SSTs and go through the whole shim requirement process?

Will simply inserting shims until tight be asking for trouble?

[5280Hawk]

Mine were really scored too.

Could it be that something didn't get seated properly? like the shafts that the knuckle bearings go on.

1 mm of space would be a lot of those shims - like five or six of them.

I didn't follow the FSM and do the calibration either. I just put the same size shims back in that came out.

[Moby]

I rebuilt mine last summer. I used the SST and the method documented in the FSM to calculate the required shims. There was no play and the fish scale test was right in the middle of the range. Are you sure that everything was seated and torqued correctly?

Worst case is perhaps your shims weren't correct to begin with. I has to get the SST because when I tore my knuckles down one side had no shims at all on top! Someone obviously left it off at some point. The race was badly scored as a result.

[Pin_Head]

Did you get the correct berings? They correct ones are 30303D (not 30303).

If you use the new Marlin seal, you make get lucky just reusing the old bottom shims, since it is more tolerant of knuckle centering problems.

http://board.marlincrawler.com/index.php?topic=32224.0

[Etsha6]

Thanks for the feedback.

Im pretty sure everything is correctly seated and torqued and that I have the "D" bearings.
Im only working on it on weekends, so will have to wait a couple of days to check on your suggestions.

[Mace]

were the old bearings Timkin and the new ones Koyo??

[nuclearlemon]

did you match bearings to races? or are you putting in new bearings with old races?