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Epic night tonight! I should just keep going for an hour to make it a 24 hour jaunt. If you want to skip the essay, just scroll down to the bold and go from there

Anyway, after work today (er, yesterday) I was going to replace front and rear bearings as well as repack some CVs and replace the odd boot or two while I was at it.

Getting Ruby Scoo apart was a bit of a saga after the murky water puddle "incident". I pulled the hubs out and the drive shafts, pulled them apart/knocked out the old bearings. All going well.
I clean up one drive shaft then the next which needed a boot replaced. No worries, got the parts, well, I should've had the parts. Turns out the inner boot I was sent was one that won't fit my circular inner cups so I rip out another one I have from Cobaw - turns out that one is a turbo CV boot. Great. Shopping list so far: 1 inner CV boot.

So I crack on with the new bearings - sealed units - so I carefully pry back the cover to find about 1/3 the amount of grease that I reckon should be in there. Packed them, hammered into place go to put the seals on and I've got two of the same seal in one kit. No worries I'll grab one from the other kit as they've probably been mixed up somewhere along the way. Bingo. Right hand hub done.
Left hand hub went well with the hammering in of the bearings - until I got to the seals. Put the inner one on first then went to do the outer one... Too big - its another inner seal Shopping list so far: 1 inner CV boot, one seal of a certain number IF its in stock.

Now ruby scoo developed a miss two days ago. She got a rest yesterday and was the same today when I moved her into the "shed". I had removed the plugs to rule them out - the passenger's bank were pretty clean as if they were being starved of fuel and the driver's side bank's plugs were black but not sooty. There are no spares in Lakes as I was going to pick up a set and replace the plugs anyway. So I put them back in and after finally getting the RHS hub and shaft re-installed I turned my attention to the engine - at *ah-hem* 3am. Plugs went in well so that was a good start. When I went to start her up she fired on the first turn with a gut wrenching "I've just wrecked my engine" sound. Some investigation by turning manually reveals a hideous noise from the water pump area. So off come the cam covers. Played around for a bit - I had to remove the radiator to remove the alternator to get to all the cam cover bolts easily. No worries. Now about that harmonic balancer - I've not got a 22mm socket or spanner. So I tried out a couple of things to no avail. I decided to pull the cam cover to make an opening at the base to see what comes out.

I got 5 small ball bearings. "BUGGER!" So after all of my efforts its going to take a miracle to get my wife and I 6 hours NWW of this little town in time for christmas. I'm about ready to give up on christmas family time at the moment...

The info I'm after:

If anyone knows the little idler bearing's part number (s) could you please text me on 0 four to 1 one ate for zero 3 won ? Say it out loud and you'll have my number

Hoping I can just replace the bearing on the idler and not the whole thing. I'm surprised Ruby was still going even though there was no noises out front.

I'm off to bed - gotta work at 8

Cheers

Bennie

Mate that sucks big time! I was lucky my diff crapped out on me with enough time to get it fixed before the silly season kicked in...

I will be in Sale from xmas day till the 28th evening and will have most of my tools with me (well, a 22mm socket at least) if you still need a hand then...

Hope you get it all resolved before chrissy!!

If you don't get the issues resolved before xmas and you end up in LE... if you need parts that will take too long by post, I'll be driving down to Sale on xmas day. If you need anything from Melbourne I can pick it up for you today or tomorrow and drop it off in LE on boxing day. Give me a call if you need me to help

Good luck!

Owen.

mate I Would recommend just replacing the idler. I can send you down a used one if you like. I know one guy who replaced the bearing with a generic one, only to have it fail and red hot bearing balls burn through the timing covers about 500kms later.

Thanks fellas.. And thanks to Captain Obvious who sent me a couple of text messages for the bearing number. On that note I've since got the harmonic balancer off and thus the centre cam cover piece to reveal the toothed cam idler without any bearings in the centre.

After removing all the bearing run idlers including the tensioning one its clear to me that I'm in need of a cam belt kit At christmas no less. It should be alright though - my better half's car has had a full service by a mate and is all good to go, so now I can leave Ruby where she is and take my time putting her back together for Robe.

Last night was epic and sorry for the ramble to get around to a very small question that in the end wasn't the lead to the answer from what I've found. I should got an have a sleep - 4 hours after 23 hours of "work" only to go back to work is not my idea of looking after myself or having fun over the festive season. Hope it only goes up from here. I'll stop now!

Cheers

Bennie

PS pics soon with any luck