7th May 2017 

With an overland trip to Nordkapp and then Russia pending I found myself needing to move "Wolfie" out of the car port to allow me to lower our Maggiolina roof tent from its storage position (hanging from the roof) on to the top of our current 4 x 4 a Toyota Land cruiser. This would necessitate fitting wheels to "Wolfie" and rolling it out of the way. Before this however I had a few jobs to finish.

New brake callipers had been delivered during the course of last week. To make them look a bit better and more importantly give them a longer life I decided to paint them with Halfords heat resistant brake paint which necessitated degreasing them before I could apply 3 coats of the red paint.

New front calliper

New rear calliper

Painting begins

The paint went on easily enough and I found that by the time I had painted the fourth calliper the first was touch dry which allowed me to immediately apply  a second coat. The third coat was applied 24 hrs later.

Before the callipers could be fitted the brake back plates had to be refurbished. Heavily contaminated with dirt and rust I cleaned them back to bare metal using a rotary brush on an angle grinder before shot blasting the harder to reach corners. Once clean I gave each back plate two coats of Hammerite Krust anti rust treatment and then 2 coats of Hammerite direct to metal satin black paint

Painted caliper mounted on rear axle

Once the brakes were fitted I fitted the back wheels - only two nuts were used on each as they will come back off soon- and removed the axle stands from under the chassis.

New callipers (painted red) with new disks and refurbished back plates

Completing the front axle proved a bit more problematic.

With the offside CV joint having been destroyed by being run dry and full of dirt (courtsay of the MOD), I had ordered a replacement from Paddock Spares. Changing the CV joint should be a relatively straight forward affair as it should simply be driven off the end of the half shaft with a few taps of a hammer. Unfortunately this was not the case as the dirt that had worked its way inside the joint was preventing the circlip type clip that retains the CV joint on the axle retracting, which in turn made it impossible to drive the CV joint off the axle itself. 

The solution was to force the CV joint back on the axle far enough to allow me to get a sharp chisel under the clip and remove it from its groove. After this the CV joint came off easily enough.

Rare 26 spline half shaft (CV Joint end)

With the old CV joint removed it soon became obvious that the new joint would not fit on to the half shaft as the shaft was of too large a diameter and had a different configuration of splines from the new joint.

After checking that the part number was correct TDJ00010,  I contacted Paddock Spares regarding this problem. Paddock were unable to help, so I contacted John Craddock who were also initially unable to help, so started a phone trawl around numerous Land Rover specialists all of whom were unable to shed any light on this problem. 

On consulting a number of forums I could find nothing on line about this - plenty of posts about half shafts and CV joints but nothing about 26 spline half shafts.  The problem was that apart from the larger diameter of "Wolfie's" half shafts, the ends had 26 square splines as opposed to 32 found on the modern Defender shafts. Even specialist after market part suppliers were unable to help.

Half shafts as fitted to "Wolfie" do not have the brass spacer

Other commitments stopped work on "Wolfie" for a few days during which time I received a call from Paul at John Craddock who was obviously as keen to find out what shafts "Wolfie" had as I was and after taking further details offered to do a bit of research and if he found out anything call me back. 

A day later Paul called back. After having spoken to John Craddock, himself Paul was able to advise me that the shafts that "Wolfie" had were a limited edition shaft that the MOD had trialed in the mid 1990s and that they were now no longer available. 

The solution was to either fit upgraded and very expensive aftermarket shafts and joints such as the ones made by Ashcroft Transmissions or Kam Diffs or to simply fit standard Defender half shafts. 

Given the price difference and the likely use we will put "Wolfie" to I opted for the cheaper standard half shaft option (Kathleen please note this cost saving!)

Internal fitting of CV joint showing square splines

With no time to wait for the delivery of the new shafts the front axle was lowered on to the workshop trolley to allow "Wolfie" to be temporarily rolled out of the car port.

Nearside (LHS) drive shaft with CV joint in better condition

Having changed one half shaft I am tempted to replace the other shaft and CV joint while the axle is stripped.

With the chassis back in the car port I fitted the front anti roll bar which was the original bar which had been cleaned back to bare metal, treated with Krust and given 3 coats of paint. Along with the bar I fitted  new poly bushes and ball joints

Front anti roll bar ready for refitting

New (rather bright) Poly bushes

"Old Man Emu" steering damper fitted