Rear End Rebuild

It's a shame that changing the rotors on the Pantera is such an involved process. The rotors on mine are in terrible shape - warped and mismatched. Not something I want to deal with.

I have a new set of Wilwood rotors ready to install but Wow De Tomaso didn't make it easy. Here's a great outline of how to tear down and rebuild the rear knuckle.

http://www.panteraplace.com/page87.htm

Here's a couple before shots. You can see how badly the rotor is rusted. Not a big deal, but try to spin this one and you can quickly see how warped it is.

I removed the knuckles (uprights) and had them sitting in my garage for a few weeks. I was planning to take them to the shop where I was going to get the half shafts rebuilt but Christmas got in the way. As usual, I decided that I just wanted to see if I could take care of the upright rebuild myself. Big problem - no press. 

So after looking at a few presses on Craig's list I decided I could make one myself. Out came some scrap metal, a couple C-clamps, two 4x4s and an old 4 ton bottle jack. Here's a picture of one of the uprights in my "back-woods" press. 

As you can see from this picture, the rotors are missing. That's because I pressed out the shaft using the rotor as the bracing point on my 4x4s. Once the shaft was out I was able to discard the warped and worn rotors.

Upon inspection of the bearings I saw that they looked pretty good. Obviously the previous owner had put in new bearings. Since I had already ordered a new set I decided to change them anyway. Glad I did, one of the uprights wasn't quite put back together right and the spacer between the inner and outer bearing was really loose.

Back to my home made press and out came the old bearings and in went the new. I'm really happy to have been able to do this work myself. Saved a bit of money and learned how to do it for future reference.

I started to but the uprights back together again and found some of the old wheel studs worn too much to reinstall. They spun in the holes - no way to put on a lug nut unless it holds after pressed into place. After searching a few of my favorite parts stores I found that I needed to purchase them online. One of the Pantera parts places has the for a mere $15 EACH!!!! Ouch. I need 10. Plus it takes 4-6 weeks shipping. Not in the cards for me.

I did a little digging and found several wheel studs in a box of parts. Then I saw an old front rotor with new studs in them. I pressed them out and found that all the ones I found worked great. So, I started putting it all together - then I found another issues. The flat place on the wheel stud that was put there to keep it from spinning in the hole didn't come into contact with anything on my new Wilwood rotors.

To fix this problem I decided to weld a tab on the wheel stud so it would give me the holding power needed to keep the stud from spinning. Here's a picture of the finished product.

After getting the studs right it was a pretty easy job of pressing in the shaft assembly. Here's several pictures of the finished product.

I finally found a tool on line to tighten up the nut on the rear hub. Now I had to figure out how to put 300 ft lbs on that nut. Here's what I came up with. I decided to strap the tire and wheel to a frame I had laying around. I then bolted the hub to the wheel. This let me hold the hub securely in place.

I took out my 3/4" ratchet and put that on the tool that I bought. The ratchet is 1.5 feet long. That means that I need to put my entire 230 lbs on the ratchet to get over 300 lbs of torque on the nut. To make this a little easier, I put an 8' bar on the ratchet. With that 8' bar it only takes less than 40 lbs to get the desired 300 ft lbs of torque. I used the long bar to get the nut very tight. I then removed the bar and put my entire weight on ratchet. Here's a couple of pictures of the set up I used to get this job done.

After having the rear out of the Pantera for over two months I finally got to bolt it all back in. Here's the pictures of what it looks like completely in place. You will notice the e-brake set-up is somewhat different than stock!!! I used WILWOOD MC4 MECHANICAL PARKING BRAKE CALIPERS FOR 0.81" WIDE DISCS to make my e-brake work. They are very economical and a nice small package. Straight out of the box it is a very tight fit onto the rotor. I decided to take the caliper apart and do a little grinding to allow the pads on the e-brake to open up a bit more. That solved the tight fit problem nicely.