Been slowly prepping the axles to start putting everything back together. Everything is clean and/or painted. I even got fancy and bought some gold paint for the hubs
I am really surprised how long it takes to clean everything! That is the bulk of the work on this project.
I ended up using Eastwood's internal frame coating for the knuckle components. I have had really good luck with this stuff...it seems to stick to everything and doesn't scratch off. It's meant to stick to the inside of rusty frames and I think it will work well on the knuckle components. It's also super thin, so if you get it into threads it doesn't gum them up at all. You can paint it over the rusty areas, but I wire-brushed and scotch-brighted everything first to get rid of the rust (within reason...there were some areas that I couldn't get to).
I really wanted to buy new hardware for everything, but it was just too expensive and I couldn't justify it. Everything was still in good shape except for a few of the split washers on the bottom knuckle bolts, so I bought some new ones of those.
I have new 555 rod ends going in as well and found that my Tie-Rod is bent. I was able to source a Japanese replacement from Cruiser Outfitters.
Bent Rod:
The rod-ends on this rig are pretty shot, so I'm excited to see how the steering feels with a set of fresh ones! Cruiser Outfitter's FAQ says that the 555 ends come pre-greased... Two of the ends come with grease fittings and the other two do not. The ones with grease fittings seemed dry, but the ones without grease fittings had a small dab of grease under the boot (I was able to take a small pick and expand the boot just a tad to look in the joint for grease). I think I'll put a pump of grease in each of them to be safe. Anyone have any experience with needing to grease the 555 rod ends right off the bat?
As I commented in my last post, my driver's side axle came apart at the birfield joint when I pulled it out. The clip at the end of the axle had busted in two and was in the birf when I took it apart. Well the passenger side came out as one unit, so the clip was still intact (as it should be). I couldn't resist and decided to seperate this inner axle shaft from the birf as well. I had never done it before and chalked it up to a learning experience. I used the pipe method and the shaft popped out of the birf with 4 hard hits. I was really surprised at the amount of force it took!
The force of the clip breaking ended up deforming the axle shaft splines just a little. I used a file to flatten them back out and the shaft fits in the birf perfectly fine now.
Here's a picture of the slightly deformed splines - you can see there is a small edge on them that needed to be filed away.
I also noticed that the splines on my axle shafts look a little different from side to side, so I guess one of them is not stock...not sure which one though.
I guess since I have both birfs out I will switch them from side to side as people have suggested.
So in taking the internals of the birfields apart, I messed up and forgot to mark which side of the cage piece faces towards the inner axle shaft.
This is the cage:
In the FSM it says the "wider" section goes towards the inner axle shaft... but there is no wider or narrower section on the FJ60.
Both side sections are exactly the same width. I measured with a set of calipers. I think this picture/comment is left over from the FJ40 FSM...the FJ40 birf cages had a wider and skinnier section. So I researched the heck out of this (not an uncommon issue among the FJ60 owners) and found that the larger diameter side of the cage should be oriented towards the inner axle. The wider side is 54mm and the thinner side is 52mm.
So when your birf is in the vise and the "tulip" is facing upwards, the 54mm side of the cage should be facing up and the protruding edges of the star shaped inner ring should be pointing upwards.
Side note - I will be using Redline CV-2 grease for this entire process (birf, knuckle, bearings and everywhere else).
There are also some ways to figure out the orientation of the cage with the size of the chamfer, but this is extra confusing and hard to tell by looking at pictures. Basically, the wider chamfer and skinnier face point upwards when the birf is in the vise with the tulip facing upwards.
I hope this helps someone in the future, there were a lot of threads on this that didn't give a very definitive answer. To triple verify this, I ran it by Torfab and had them measure the diameter of a cage from a stock birf and it lined up with the 54mm diameter facing upwards (towards the inner axle). I am very confident this is the correct way to set these up!
Hopefully tomorrow I'll have some time to start putting all this back together. I'm slightly dreading getting the inner axle shafts back into the birfields with the new clips...I hear that can be a real pain!!
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