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Damn that's crazy seeing all of those bolts, nut and washers together.
When I plated all my hardware for my 2002 Touring I laid everything on a big A3 paper and wrote down where it came from. So when I got everything back from plating I could lay the parts on the paper and know where it needs to go.
Yeah, I've worked on and built enough E30's I have no worried about putting it back together with the right hardware where it belongs. What really adds to the complication is that I had the host vehicle, and I had an identical donor. I saved all the hardware from both, discarded a few obviously damaged (tool marks etc) pieces, but in general... I have 2x quantity of everything. All of the bolts from the bad transmission are in there too so those will all be shiny new as well.
When everything comes back from plating I will organize by fastener type, length etc into little bins so at least I have it broke up a little.
Another fun filled day of bead blasting. I made it completely through the "holes" bin before managing to blast a hold in my off hand glove. The beads don't really hurt hitting my finger, but the glove fills with gritty glass pretty quick lol. Cabinet is down for the count until I can replace the glove.
I moved the calipers to their own bin, and continued filling this one. Coming right along.
With the cabinet mostly sorta down I moved from blast heavy project to some smaller detail work.
I've never had the rear brake proportioning valve open before, and the nicer one I have was plugged, not passing shop air... so I decided to open it up, break it down, and clean it up. I cleaned and bagged the internals, freed up the ball valve, and then blasted the exterior case for plating.
Moving on to a couple of turds I've been kicking around for a few weeks, the better set of the four front hubs. These came off the parts car that has been standing for the last 10 years, the ones from the flood car looked a little worse and one felt a bit gritty.
I decided rather than buy two new ones at ~155ea I'd take these good feeling used ones and rebuild them. It seems like not long ago these were closer to $50/ea but like everything... they are going up.
The one on the left obviously disassembled and partially blasted.
All cleaned of the old shitty white grease and ready to rebuild. Seriously though, the original grease is terrible, and not much of it is used either. Both of these units were not original to the car and had been replaced at some point in its life because the grease was still whitish yellow. Take apart an old original bearing and what grease is left will be brown, thick, and caked up.
Both wheel hubs awaiting repacking, the one on the left I burnished with steel wool to bring back some luster after blasting, emulating the new finish. The one on the right will be done next.
Everything laid out for one bearing assembly, cleaned and dried of solvents that could contaminate the new grease.
Wheel hub packed full of nice new Redline CV2 grease. No points awarded here for neatness, get it in there and be generous.
Plastic cage dropped in place.
Pack the cage full.
Snap the ball bearings in place, extra grease should splooge out around them.
Insert the rear radial seal, grease the inner race, and pack a bit more grease on over the ball bearings before snapping the race in place.
Done with the back side, now to flip over.
I'll save you the front as the process is the same.
I'm guessing as they felt good, Jordan just popped them apart and cleaned them out, did the blasting and reassembled the original bearings. I'd hope so since the outer race is there in all the pictures.
Indeed, nothing replaced here except the grease. I took two good working units and repacked them with premium grease. Repacking wheel bearings used to be very common place, as a maintenance item. Now everyone just runs parts into the ground and replaces them outright.
I also took the opportunity to mask and blast the hubs to recondition them cosmetically. Total time for both invested was about an hour and a half maybe.
Because BMW machines the bore and o-ring groove after plating. I thought you were a perfectionist? :p
Actually they don't.
I bought brand new ATE rear calipers and the entirety of the assembly was plated, including the bore and seal lip. I disassembled the calipers to replace a melted dust boot and upon inspection, it was apparent that it was machined then plated afterwards.
Originally posted by whysimon
WTF is hello Kitty (I'm 28 with no kids and I don't have cable)
FYI, you can put too much grease into a bearing. The extra grease causes increased drag which heats the bearing up and makes it fail prematurely. This isn't really an issue on bearings that see low speeds, but on higher speed bearings like machine spindles, it's a must to put the right amount of grease in. Not sure if a wheel bearing sees a high enough of a speed to matter. Probably not.
Edit: More on this. Give a stock tire size of 185/65-14 with a rolling radius of 298mm (taken from e30zone.net), at 60 mph the wheels would be turning at 625 RPM.
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