In the last two or three weeks I've made a significant amount of progress in lots of areas, but there is still much to do if I'm going to make the first race in early March. The major achievement of the last couple of weeks is that I've completed the initial mouting of the new differential. Unfortunately I've had to construct the mounting from heavy old steel. Hopefully in the longer term I can replace the steel bits that I've fabricated with some nice light alloy plates.
Mounting the diff was a key step on the critical path to getting this beast back to the track. With the Diff mounted I spent a long time trying to get the drive shafts sorted out. Of course with the new diff my old shafts dont fit and so I needed to get some new ones made up. It turns out that my outer CV joints are Escort based and the driveshaft cups on the new diff are Fiesta ones, true to form nothing is ever easy and Mr H. Ford seems to have used a myriad array of different splines to join the wheels to the engine on his various models, this is not helped as on a typical car there will be 4 different sets of splines (diff, each end of the DS and then in the hub.) All of which makes matching a non standard DS to inner CV joint, outer CV joint and the hub a bit of a challenge.
After bemoaning this situation to Aiden he mentioned that he has a couple of Sierra 4x4 front driveshafts left over from the Tiger he is building and that I was welcome to them.
Miraculously they had the correct splines on each end, but were too short. This turned out to be a blessing as I was able to cut them in half and fit them to the diff and hub respectively. I could then link the two with a tube and move the suspension through it's full range of movement. This gave me the total lengths of the shafts (54 qand 56 cms so I guess the diff is off center) So now with the lengths and samples of the correct splines I can get some bespoke shafts made up by GB engineering of Natwich.
Next on the list was a handbrake mechanism. As my old diff also had the handbrake mechanism I need a replacement system. Rather than faffing around making something I decided to take the easy option. Wilwood do some new Powerlight 4 pot alloy callipers with an integral handbrake mechanism. These seem a good place to start, and a careful trial fit of somes seems to indicate that they are an almost direct replacement for my existing Hi Spec units so I need to order some of these and feed the Hi Specs to the ebay vultures.
