I reshimmed both my front wheels today using Norm Nock's method where you
clean everything up to remove the grease.
I have a bunch of the stock shims in the various sizes and some homemade
brass shims in .005 and .003.
Today I observed you need to get within .001" or .002" of the right
thickness for it all to work properly. So make sure you have some of the
.003 and .005 shims handy.
The total thickness required was in the neighborhood of .048" to .050".
At Orchard Supply, I'd previously bought a couple of .050" Machine bushings
in 7/8" ID x 1-3/8" OD--these make really good one-piece shims. You have to
trim the OD down a little to fit the recess in the outside wheel bearing. By
trial and error, anyone with a belt or disc sander could sand one of these
down to where it would fit exactly.
I didn't do this because I don't have a belt sander and it was taking too
long to sand it down by hand.
The best I could do was to get it to the point where, dry, I could feel the
tiniest amount of play in it. Then when I packed the bearings with grease
the whole thing spun freely with no observable play.
The only problem then was, with the castellated nut fully tightened, neither
of the cotter-pin holes lined up.
At this point I filed and sanded the nut down to where the castellation
lined up with one of the holes.
FWIW.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot--the whole process took from 10 in the morning to
430 in the afternoon. What a pain in the ass this system is!
An aside--don't flame me--the brass shims have been in there for a couple of
years with the bearings slightly mis-adjusted and they're still the same
thickness--I think they work as well as the steel shims do and you can make
your own with an x-acto knife if you have access to shim brass.
--
Steve Gerow
Pasadena CA
59 BN6
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