Front Axle & Steering Box Renovation

I bought a very nice king pin kit from a stall at Beaulieu Autojumble complete with bushes, thrust bearings and cotter pins. I pushed out the old bushes from my stub axle carriers and pressed in the new bushes. These required to be reamed to fit the king pins and I was fortunate to make contact with vintage car owner Tom McIlwraith who had acquired some of the tools from the Arrol Johnson factory when it closed and did the reaming for me with the correct pilot reamer for my axle carriers.

Some time later I realised that some of my slackness was due to ovality in the eyes of my axle beam and here I got good advice and help from fellow SS Jaguar owner Denis Foxley. Denis suggested using the services of an engineering company who maintained the beam axles of London buses. I stripped my axle beam and cleaned and wrapped it up securely in brown paper for a trip to London. Denis very kindly offered to pick me up from Heathrow with my axle and take me to the engineering company and do the reverse some days later after the oval eyes had been machined out and steel bushes pressed in.

British Airways were happy to accept my axle as hold luggage but I must admit to being a little apprehensive carrying the heavy package through London Airport as this was not long after Mr Harry Stanley had been shot dead in London for carrying a wooden table leg wrongly identified as a gun.

The new King Pins and (8) and new track rod ends (24) eliminated much of the free play at the steering wheel but the steering box also accounted for a proportion.

Steering Box

Turning the steering wheel with the top of the steering box removed it was clear that in my case most of the free play resulted from slackness in the bush (10) at the bottom of the rocker arm shaft but was also due to free play between the peg and the steering nut. I decided to replace the bush and oil seal below it but not to alter the peg slackness. However, as a trial I measured the peg in a spare steering box. The supposedly circular peg had a diameter of 0.750" but measuring at 90 degrees on the normal thrust faces it measured 0.745". So to eliminate the 5 thou play (that probably accounted for about an inch of play at the steering wheel rim) I thought I would try removing the peg and remounting it rotated by 90 degrees.

The peg is a taper fit in the rocker arm and is peened over on the top. I wasn't 100% confident of my re-peening but I guess that even if the peg had become loose in the arm it was not possible for it drop out with a total loss of control.