How I spent my Saturday afternoon

Yesterday was supposed to be taken up with a repair on the 4WD hubs on Grimm. And it was.

Unfortunately, a misdiagnoses made it so that the problem was not fixed.

That was supposed to a the first in a line of pics documenting the repair process, but it ended up being the only pic taken yesterday.

As you can see just to the outside of the jackstand, Grimm is leaking. We had assumed that it was coming from the more common leak point of the front hub and that a removal of the brake drum and the inner hub components and replacing of the bearings and seals within would fix the problem.

Sadly, for my wallet anyway, that isn’t the problem. Once the tire was removed and a closer inspection had taken place, it appears that the leak is coming from the outer seal of the Dana 44 front axle. This will require a real shop with a mechanic who has experience in yanking out 4WD axleshafts to complete. While we had the tools to “probably” fix it, “probably” isn’t good enough for me where Grimm is concerned. Ultimate reliability is why I bought him and that needs to be payed for and not guessed at.

However, I was told that this problem isn’t very common and the 4WD experts in yesterday’s work crew had not only never had to do this repair themselves, they hadn’t heard of too many folks who have had to do it period. I’ll prolly be replacing 30+ year old factory installed parts. So, in my attempt at being an optimist, that’s a good thing.

The misdiagnoses comes, in part, because of the size of Grimm’s feet and not being able to see around them to the problem and judging it to be the more common of the two ailments. Which brings me to another point I discovered on the way home that night:

Grimm’s feet are 14 inches wide. Times four equals 56 inches of rubber on the ground.

When you have to lock them up during brake pumps to stop a damn near 6000lb vehicle because the guy in front of you is either drunk or an idiot (or most likely both) and he makes an highly unnecessary maneuver, you make so much fucking noise that people in vehicles around you recoil in horror and move away.

On a good note, Ford over engineered the braking system and the dual piston caliper means that Grimm stops well from 50MPH.