I had plans to drop the transaxle today and start loosening up the bolts. I got her shift coupler detached. I had upgraded to urethane bushings for this back in 2017 when I replaced her shifter bushing It is all still very tight. (I remember how sloppy she was before this maintenance!) Now the drawing…
Category: System – Drivetrain

Murbella – Day 30 – Cleaning, Painting, More…
So while I had intended to drop her top so I could easily have access to undoing the shifting rod from the transmission as well as using her interior for storage space, I ran into a slight problem that I did not foresee. With her up on stands, there’s absolutely no way to clear the…

Murbella – Day 23 – Short Block Disassembly
Given everything I encountered with taking the pistons and cylinders off, it was clear that I need to address the engine fully, and nut just clean it up and hope that new pistons, new cylinders, and new or rebuilt heads would give it the longevity it needs. So I cracked the case. Compared to the…

Murbella – Day 16 – Suspension off to soda blasting!
So all of the rear suspension parts are as ready as they will be for blasting. After doing some research and talking to my son I decided to tape off most of the surfaces for where the outer wheel bearing and the inner grease seal sit on both arms. From the pic above, you can…

Murbella – Day 14 – More arts cleaning and sanding
I took an hour break from working to go clean some more parts and try to get some sanding done before dusk hits. I try not to make too much noise with power tools before 10am or really after 6pm as a courtesy to my neighbors. Spring Plate Covers I continued sanding up and roughing…

Murbella – Day 12 – Passenger Side Stub Axle and Bearings Removed
I took advantage of an extremely pleasant morning and afternoon to start disassembling the passenger side suspension and remaining bits of the drivetrain in the trailing arm. Most parts have the same random spraying of undercoating, and this time the spring plate covers and spring plates torsion bar areas were extremely bad and far worse…

Murbella – Day 10 – Spacer finally removed!!!
I kept debating about the damn stub axle, knowing I could not use any garage heat to really get it hot enough to budge it any further. I decided to manually hacksaw it off since at least I could try and control the angle and not risk damaging the shaft itself. It took about 15…

Murbella – Day 8 – Stub axle spacer drama continued!
So that damned inner bearing spacer has been a major problem. I finally asked my son to get involved and while I applied continuous heat from the torch he managed to finally get a flathead in the gap and some progress was made in getting it moving away from the base. I had hoped to…

Murbella – Day 7 – Stub Axle spacer drama!
So when I got the stub axle out of the bearing housing the other day the inner spacer came out with it. Now I don’t mean just out with it… i mean really out with it! The spacer will not budge at all. I’ve been soaking the stub axle for days in mineral spirits to…

Murbella – Day 5 – Stub Axle Removal and Bearing Housing Disassembly
So what it really comes down to is my fear of hitting things too hard to avoid any possibility of damage. I couldn’t remove the stub axle yesterday since I was being too kind to it. Today was a different matter. I used the rubber end of a hammer to safeguard the end and with…