The most difficult tasks?
 

While working on the Chev brakes it occurred to me to ask what are the most difficult or awkward tasks in the restoration of your CMP?

Certainly remove/replace the master cylinder on a 3 ton Ford is one, even replacing the front hub can be hard until you remember to start the nut on the thread then pull/push the hub to centre the bearing spacer.

Then there are those who didn't realise the threads on the wheel nuts are left hand on that side of the vehicle...

How about shimming the swivel pin caps? Replacing a Ford pinion gear?

MOST DIFFICULT TASK
 

Digging the Chev out of the snow bank every weekend...

Well its not exactly about a CMP, it is about a Carrier.

Mine has to be either getting it extracated out of an old overgrown wire fence that was well hidden and unoticed until the carrier came to a lurching stop after the tracks had caught it in the bush. Or the time the rad blew up and I had to walk from one end of the farm to the other and get my grandfather to tow me back to the barns with a tractor. I don't think ive ever seen him with such a huge smile on.

Just discovered another one...
 

Having removed a front mudguard (fender to you Canucks) which was rusty enough to have come from Ontario, and having panelbeaten a good Ford front mudguard there was the discovery that the Ford guard has a different radius which results in about half an inch protruding from the front. Back to the spares pile (courtesy of Euan).

11 and 12 cabs
 

It's got to be fitting the cab panels back onto the arch bar after they are all sprayed up with first and second coat so you don't want to scratch them while heaving and pushing and poking with a pry bar.

I've done a few now and they all seem to expand as soon as you take them apart.

Pete :mad:

Fluid leaks
 

My pet hate is trying to stop fluid leak, transfer case out put shafts, gearbox tire pumps, rear main oil seal (especially trying to replace the rear wick seal with out taking the engine out.) That just leaves brake fluid & water.:bang: :bang: :cheers:

Getting an F15 from Manatoba to Tampa, the rest should be cake.

Jonathan Lewis

Most difficult task..
 

...trying to convince the missus of the need of another WWII historically significant POS in the backyard...everything else from the 6000mile drives (yup no bs) to pick the stuff up to working on my back in -23 in December (17ish hours of dark) under the carrier removing the steering cam plate, holding bolts on the bottom of a carrier while trying to turn them on the inside almost standing on my head under the steering wheel ( I'm 6'2" and stout ), finding time or rare parts, getting paint or parts from a store 1435km away, etc etc ...are all a cinch compared to the missus factor.
Sean

So far it's been fighting with rusted-in fasteners - sometimes the old screws turn out like butter and then there's the ones that the heads torque off, also like butter, then there's that one rusted-solid SOB that finally has to be cold chiselled off, to be drilled out at a later date - I really hate breaking stuff to get things undone.
One of the old brake front line connections was really driving me nuts for hours, but I finally got it off.
It's like doing cryptic crosswords, which I like. Each word-clue is a puzzle in itself, and sometimes the answer just pops up and other times, I can worry away at one clue for hours or over days.
The project is like that, the whole puzzle is just a bunch of smaller puzzles to be solved - sometimes a single screw becomes a project all on its own.
And I'm told the disassembly is the easy part ...

Difficult?
 

sounds more like this is the MOST fun for you! I know what you mean and have you ever noticed how one side of a machine will come apart easy and the other is all seized up. If its in an open field it seems the north side is the one always seized up. One of my carrier brakes was free and the other took hours to free up before we could roll it out of the woods where it sat for generations.
Sean

More difficult things
 

Further to the brakes on the Chev... something which makes life hard is when someone in the past has used a cold chisel on the rear hub nuts. :devil: One of the inner ones was not only tight on the thread, but the chisel had so distorted the edge of the nut the original hub spanner wouldn't fit over it.

Now that's a coincidence
 

Keith - I discovered exactly that the other day when I went to take the hub nuts off, after I had gone and bought a nice big 2.75" socket and 3/4" drive to do just that - the corners of the nuts are all chewed and and peened, likely by another chisel artist. I was able to get them moving with a brass drift, using the burrs on the shoulders of the nuts for bite. I think I can grind the burrs off and save the nut.

Incidentally, I found getting the hub off even harder, because the shoes were binding and the pistons were extended and rusted in place - I had to drive the piston back a bit with a taper punch to free up the shoe from the drum.

Wheel cylinders
 

Mark, I can relate to your story - just as well you managed to get the hub off far enough to get at the cylinder, or it might have been sledge hammer time for the drum! I also found one side was a lot easier than the other. The only other hazard was a very nasty black spider lurking in the recesses of the outer drum, but some fuel tempted it out so I could squash it. Their bite turns your skin necrotic. We have lots of those fun nasties here.

I made another interesting discovery as I was cleaning the short axle prior to refitting - it had a split for about 3/4 of it's length, right down the middle but was solid both ends... only a matter of time before it sheared into several messy pieces, but fortunately I had a spare. It was also bent. Makes you wonder what happened - was it just metal fatigue or rough handling... usually they tend to break just outboard of the spline necessitating removal of the diff centre.

Pulling hubs and drums against brakes
 

Yes, pulling the hubs and drums can be fun. I modified a socket so that it will take off both front and rear axle nuts. http://www.canadianmilitarypattern.com/Tools.html Then to pull the hubs and drums I use a big wheel puller that bolts down to three of the wheel studs then pulls the drum and hub off with a big center screw shaft. As I apply force to the center puller, I keep hitting the brake drum fore and aft with a big rubber mallet. Used the same trick on the Pattern 12 recently was successful in pulling all four drums with minimum of problems and without damaging the brake shoes or anything else.

PULLING DRUMS
 

I found out the hard way of course, that the drums come off quite easily. If you don't have a puller to fit your drum, I recommend the following:

a. loosen off both adjusting cams;
b. remove the brake line from the wheel cylinder;
c. remove the wheel cylinder bolts (drift the cylinder slightly inwards while bolts are still attached);
d. remove the nuts off the anchor pins (drift the pins inwards while the nuts are still attached); and
e. use a rubber mallet to rock the drum back and forth...

There was a world of difference between the removal of the first drum and the last drum.

Advice
 

That's excellent advice, Richard - should save a lot of pain in the future..

Keith

Re: PULLING DRUMS
 

All of this of course applies only to the first time you remove that ugly great lump of stuck parts that once was a brake. Once you’ve taken it apart once cleaned painted and lubricated everything. Removal of brake drum goes like it says in the manual.

Crikey!
 

That's something I understand about Oz - lots of poisonous nasties (Snikes, and so on). All I'm turning up is the odd little paper wasp nest, long abandoned. I found a single cell nest hanging from the brake shoes on each side inside the drums (the right hand hub came right off, by the way [after I had realized the wheel nuts were LH thread!] and the hub nuts were also chiselled so I had to brass-drift them off as well.) Anyway, that makes about six or so little wasp nests I have removed from the HUP.
Wasps and hornets here can give you a powerful sting that swells up for a while, but that's all. A colony of bald-faced hornets built a huge nest in the backyard a couple of years ago and they never bothered me once, because I left them alone, kept a metre from the opening and didn't make any sudden moves while I was rebuilding the fence right underneath them. Interesting insects to watch. (I was rebuilding the fence as it had a lot of rotten boards, which I figured was why I had the hornets - the rotte wood was the source for their paper-making.
Anyway, I ground the spurs off the hub nuts OK, so I can use the socket for replacement.
Now for the front hubs ...