2007 Fpv Tornado Ute - Tinkering & Setup

[FiftyOne]

Exact same problem here! Was going to comment on a fantastic fix for this, right until the end lol

I'll know where I need to tackle the problem though when I get to fixing mine. Again, tops write up

[PhilMeUp]

Monday, 29th June, 2015 - Part 1

After replacing the front indicator globes last week I wanted to do the same with the rear ones. I dropped the tailgate and removed the two bolts that hold the tail light in place.

To prevent scratching the paint, I used an upholstery removal tool to lever the tail light out from its mounting. That’s twice in one week that I’ve actually used the proper tool for something like this, instead of the usual flat-blade screwdriver. Hell is freezing over.

Then I realised that the rear indicators have a clear globe and an orange lense, instead of the orange globe and clear lens that the front indicators have. Thus, there was no reason to replace the globes.

The front indicator globes are a fairly uncommon BAU15s globe, instead of the much more common BA15s that most cars use. The rear indicator globes are the common BA15s. You can see the minor difference in the bayonets. I have no idea why Ford decided to go with the uncommon (ie harder to find) BAU15s.

It had taken a fair bit of leverage with the upholstery removal tool to get the tail light out, so I squirted some silicon spray into the mountings to make it a bit easier if I need to remove it again some day.

The hard lid open - I’m going to remove it once I start using the Tornado regularly. The rear tub is in good condition.

I’m pleased that the buttons are already in place for future soft tonneau use. I have no regular need to enclose the tub area, but will be carrying things occasionally that I want to keep covered (ie wet weather). I’m going to keep a soft tonneau folded up and kept behind one of the seats for occasional use.

Why remove the hard lid? Try carrying a motorbike in the back…

I’ll either keep the hardlid setup stored at home (if I can find somewhere for it) or advertise it for sale. If I sell it then the proceeds will go toward a set of tyres that the 353rwkw needs. This thing spins the back wheels easily on dry bitumen, so will require very delicate throttle control in wet conditions.

Tonight’s job was to replace the centre bearing. The hard part about doing this at home is getting underneath the car. I drove the car up onto some ramps and then jacked up the back of the car with a trolley jack at the diff.

Once the trolley jack was at maximum height I put some axle stands under the front mounts of the leaf springs. I put the yellow chocks under the front wheels to ensure that the car wouldn’t roll backward when I jacked up the back of the car (ie once the back wheels are off the ground there is no handbrake).

Once the axle stands were in place I let the trolley jack down a bit to put weight on the stands, but left the trolly jack in place as a backup.

After double checking everything I got underneath the car.

I started by removing the three bolts that bolt the rubber drive coupling to the transmission. This is where an extra long ratchet spanner comes in handy. I bought the Draper 19494 Extra Long 18mm Metric Ratcheting Combination Spanner for bolts such as this and the ones that attach the tail shaft to the diff on my taxi.

The bolts on the rear of the tail shaft were on extremely tight. I used an extendable ratchet and six-sided impact socket, and watched carefully as I applied pressure to each bolt to ensure that none of the bolt heads started to strip.

I used a mallet and large flat-blade screwdriver to push the tail shaft out of the diff mounting.

Eventually I had the tail shaft out.

As I don’t have a bench and vice, I put the tail shaft in my hydraulic press. I was careful to only use as pressure as required to hold the tail shaft (ie not enough pressure to squash the tube).

The rubber around the centre bearing was well and truly perished.

Anyone want to buy a secondhand centre bearing? Only slightly used...

I started disassembling the CV joint with an 8mm allen key socket.

I needed to put some markings on each part so that I can ensure that I put them back together in the same way. I didn’t have a suitable white marker pen so tried a fine point black marker pen. I figured that there was a risk of that getting wiped off with my hands so dug out a very old bottle of touch-up paint and put paint dots everywhere.

Once the bolts were moved the CV joint came apart.

With a pair of circlip pliers I then removed the circlip on the end of the shaft.

I removed the boot clamp with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

Once the clamp was off I started pushing the rubber boot back with a flat-blade screwdriver.

I pushed the rubber boot back as far as I could and ended up using a rubber mallet to knock the CV joint half off the shaft.

[PhilMeUp]

A few solid taps with the mallet pushed the CV joint off the shaft.

I made sure that I’d bought the correct centre bearing.

Making sure that I had a record of which way around the new centre bearing was meant to go on.

It was a bit of a battle, but enough thumping with a hammer and chisel eventually got the old centre bearing off.

I put some metal tube over the new centre bearing to tap it into place.

I finally had the new centre bearing in place.

Getting the rubber boot over the end of the shaft was a challenge. I used some needle-nose pliers to pull it over but was careful to not tear the rubber boot.

Sliding the rubber boot on was difficult. I pushed a fairly small flat-blade screwdriver through and rotated it around in circles to help slide the rubber boot along the shaft.

Once that half of the CV joint had slid into place I could start bolting things back together.

I didn’t want any vibration from the completed tail shaft, so used a torque wrench to tighten each bolt the same amount.

Finally, a completed tail shaft with a new centre bearing.

As mentioned, I had used minimal pressure with the hydraulic press to hold the tail shaft in place.

I decided to get very carried away with being thorough with this tail shaft. I loosened the bolts on the rubber coupling and retightened them to 77Nm.

The new centre bearing and the old one, side by side. A huge difference.

Finally, I had replaced the very deceased old centre bearing with a new one.

When I removed the tail shaft I did it the hard way by wrestling it past the exhaust. This meant pushing the exhaust to one side enough (ie rubber mounts on the exhaust) until there was enough gap between it and the car body. With one hand, while trying to hold the complete tail shaft up with the other hand.

At the time, I was directly underneath the exhaust and couldn’t see any other option.

However, when it came to putting the tail shaft back in I had a proper look and realised that it could easily be fed over the top of the exhaust at the back of the car and through to the front. Much easier.

There was a bit more wrestling to get the tail shaft and transmission to line up properly.

Once again the torque wrench got used to make sure that everything was consistently torqued up to Ford’s specifications.

Once I had the front of the tail shaft bolted back in it was time to bolt in the back of the tail shaft. The torque wrench was used to ensure consistency.

The finished job. At last, a new centre bearing in place.

[PhilMeUp]

That’s a nice shiny new fuel filter there. It will look nice in the rubbish bin - I was always going to replace it anyway.

I used 14mm and 19mm spanners to hold the filter in place and loosen the nuts. I was pleased that the 14mm nuts on the pipes came loose quite easily and didn’t round off. A 14mm flare spanner would be better for this, but I don’t have one.

I put in place a Motorcraft AFG55AA fuel filter (ie Ford genuine part).

I was rapt to finally complete the two tasks that I had set for underneath the car. But what the hell, while I’m there I might as well have a look at the transmission mount rubber.

I removed the cross member and found that although the rubber wasn’t entirely finished, it was on its way. I didn’t have a new one and so decided to leave the car up on the ramps and axle stands for the night so that I could replace it the next day.

Another photo of the Plazmaman surge tank.

Whenever I do work like this I always make sure that I get the car finished for the night and back on wheels (ie drivable). However, I made an exception this time so that I could have easy access to the transmission mount. It was about 5am and 7.1 degrees outside when I decided to knock off for the night.

[PhilMeUp]

Monday, 29th June, 2015 - Part 2

After leaving the car up on ramps and axle stands last night I made sure that I bought a new transmission mount today so that I could get the car back on wheels and drivable.

At least I already knew what tools I would need - it’s all 13mm for the transmission mount. No repeatedly climbing out from underneath the car to get yet another spanner or socket.

There is a crossmember that bolts to the car body. Between that crossmember and the transmission sits a rubber mount, which supports the transmission without transferring vibrations into the car.

When the rubber separates from the metal the transmission will transfer vibrations to inside the car cabin.

Despite being almost identical to the rubber mount for the BTR 4 speed transmission, the mount for the 6 speed ZF is almost twice the price. Both are made my MacKay Rubber, in Queensland.

The two nuts at the top weren’t particularly easy to access but a 13mm ratchet spanner got in there. Those nuts were on tight and I was a bit concerned that they would strip. And there wasn’t room to fit a 6-sided socket and ratchet in there. It took some force but each nut eventually came loose.

Once I had loosened all the downward facing nuts and bolts I used a cordless drill to quickly remove them.

The old transmission mount, about to be removed.

Yep, definitely worth replacing.

The back of the transmission area, before putting the new mount in.

The new transmission mount in place.

With removing the two nuts at the top, I would have had slightly easier access if I had have removed the crossmember completely before undoing the two top nuts.

I then bolted the bottom of the transmission mount to the crossmember.

To finish off I had to push the crossmember upward so that the bolts would reach the threads in the car body. This is where the cordless drill was also handy - once I got each bolt lined up I could just pull the trigger on the drill and watch the bolt fly in, instead of stuffing around clumsily with a ratchet.

However, I had to be careful with making sure that the bolts and threads were lined up properly before spinning the bolts rapidly with the drill - I didn’t want to risk damaging any of the threads in the car body.

Even without trying to bend the rubber you can see how it is starting to break apart.

Now I was finished with being underneath the car.

Then I decided to check the spare wheel winch. More problems. Tomorrow night’s job.

[PhilMeUp]

Tuesday, 30th June, 2015

I urgently needed a driver’s window regulator for another car last night, which resulted in some hunting on Gumtree and a bunch of phone calls. The house that I ended up going to had a BA XR6 Turbo sedan being wrecked in the back shed.

I noticed that the driver’s seat belt was still in the car, which is quite rare. The driver’s seat belt is one of the first things that sells from a Falcon wreck.

I asked how much he wanted for the seat belt. $20. Sold. Heck, they’re generally impossible to find for $50, and this gave me a quick and easy solution to my seat belt stuff-up last night. I was extremely pleased.

I actually ended up buying a bunch of stuff from that wreck - the six CD/colour screen ICC, the blower fan (ie under the glovebox), the driver’s door interior handle, the driver’s seat belt and the driver’s window regulator. Total cost - $150 for the lot. I’ll probably resell the ICC for twice that later on - I have no use for it, but it was too cheap to pass up on. This also results in the seat belt replacement costing me nothing. Much better.

Falcon seat belts won’t unwind unless they are mounted in the car - I’ll figure out how to get around that one of these days. I removed the stuffed seat belt from the Tornado, put the replacement in, pulled the belt out and put some vise-grip pliers on to stop it from retracting.

Time to get the Ryobi pressure washer out and use the exotic $44.70 garden hose that I bought after screwing up this very simple task two nights ago.

The old garden hose had two tiny size holes that were squirting small jets of water everywhere. In winter (ie cold). After stuffing up the other seat belt I was nowhere near having the temperament to put up with cold water being squirted onto the backs of my legs when I tried doing this again.

The hose with the tiny holes will be disposed of by some sort of ritual involving fire. In front of the new hose, to show what happens to hoses that squirt cold water onto my legs.

The guide wasn’t anywhere near as grimy as the guide on the previous seat belt.

The other side was also quite clean.

This is the setting that I used to stuff this up on Sunday night. Do not ever use the Ryobi RPW3200’s zero degree setting on a seat belt.

Being consistent, I still couldn’t do the job correctly. Next time I do a seat belt that is out of the car I might actually think to put this end of it in a plastic bag to keep it dry.

Spraying water through the webbing. I waved the wand up and down each side of the belt and then through the middle section.

One cleaned seat belt. That I hadn’t ruined yet. Now I was on a roll.

The guide now looked like new.

The other side of the guide, also looking like new.

Although I ran a towel back and forth along the webbing it was still a tad damp. And I’d gotten the roller end soaking wet. I put it on the front floor of my taxi and left the engine idling for 20 minutes with the heater on full (aimed at the foot area).

After that amount of time the whole seat belt was perfectly dry.

My temper began to improve. Just a tad.

Mounting the base of it back into the car. In the home stretch - not really much left for me to stuff up now.

The plastic was already pretty clean, but as I don’t foresee any passionate enthusiasm for doing this again in the near future I decided to give the plastic a quick clean in the laundry.

The taxi was still warmed up from drying the seat belt, so I put the plastic in there for a few minutes to also dry off.

Once I put the seat belt back into the car it was retracting reasonably well, but I squirted some silicon spray into the bottom of the guide to make it work better.

This helps to lubricate between the seat belt webbing and plastic guide.

If your seat belt isn’t retracting properly and you don’t have the tools or inclination to remove the seat belt and wash it, then do this first.

The WD40 brand of silicon spray has that oh-so-useful nozzle that flips up, instead of looking around for one of those little tube things and then spending 10 minutes going nuts while trying to jam it into the nozzle (and watching it flick away into the distance when it doesn’t slide in).

I have seen these cans in SuperCheap Auto and Bunnings. Buy one. Amongst other things, use it to lubricate the seat belt guide and window guides.

It is one of the greatest injustices in the world that every single aerosol can ever made doesn’t also have a flip-up nozzle like this.

At last, it was time to pull the seat belt out and see if it retracted properly.

It did. Very quickly. It was good.

I did this numerous times, giggling like a psychotic idiot. After two attempts, and way too much time, I had actually gotten a seat belt to retract.

With overwhelming euphoria I stood back and marvelled at the fact that I now had a properly functioning seat belt.

[PhilMeUp]

Geez you tear through the work Phil I wish I had your motivation mate. Good to hear it's not playing up anymore. Seems odd just plugs had been the cause?

Also for engine flushing I prefer to just run a quality diesel oil in it for a few short change intervals. Once it starts draining clean(relative) things are going well. Those engine flush solutions do work but also have their risks if your engine is particularly dirty.

Nah, not a whole lot of motivation this time around. It's been a week and I haven't even finished the list of things that I was going to do on the first night.

With the blue one last last year and early this year, I couldn't get enough of it. Every spare second was spent getting that thing cleaned and ready for a licencing inspection.

This one... can't be stuffed. Not really into it that much. This one's definitely more of a "get me to the ^%#$ destination" rather than "enjoy the ride". It's also bloody cold outside - 7 degrees late at night is common at the moment. And I wear shorts and t-shirt every day of the year.

Huge problem: I know from my taxi background what goes wrong with these cars and what wears out. Which means that I know what work to do now to ensure perfect reliability. But it would be a hell of a lot easier to be naive about it all and watch tv inside the house instead...

Exact same problem here! Was going to comment on a fantastic fix for this, right until the end lol

I'll know where I need to tackle the problem though when I get to fixing mine. Again, tops write up

I wrote a photo guide for cleaning seat belts last year: http://www.fordxr6turbo.com/forum/topic/89678-photo-essay-cleaning-seat-belts

Basically, it's the lubrication from the silicon spray that makes it retract properly. I just go one step further and clean the grime out of the seat belt webbing and plastic guide to try and make it work for longer (ie slow down the build-up of grime in the plastic guide).

It's worth removing the outer plastic and having a look at the plastic guide (ie underneath where the webbing slides) to see how much grime there is. If there's heaps of mess, and you've got a Torx T50 socket, then go to a car wash and blast water through the seat belt there. Take vise-grip pliers and let the car heater dry the belt for 10 minutes. Easy.

I recently ordered some little polishing discs that I'm going to use with my Dremel to see if I can polish the bottom of the plastic guide. Dunno if that will make any difference or not but will have a go.

Edited 30/06/15 03:43 PM by PhilMeUp

[k31th]

<---------------- about this happy, yeah?

[PhilMeUp]

<---------------- about this happy, yeah?

One Powerball....

Pretty please?

I'm also considering permanently carrying a shovel and several bags of lime in the back of the ute.

For quick disposal of the body if any arsehole ever crashes into the damn thing.

This one looked sooooo good in the Pickles photos... and it's turned out to be yet another big fixer-upper job.

[PhilMeUp]

Tuesday, 1st July, 2015

Tonight it was time to get into some mechanical work by replacing the front wheel bearing hubs. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this car is making huge amounts of noise on the road and I’m pretty sure that this noise is coming from worn front bearing hubs.

The wheels still had the original FPV lock nuts. The matching socket was in the glovebox, which defeats the point of having lock nuts in the first place (ie that’s the first place that a thief will look).

The amount of rust on the disc rotors indicated that removing them was going to be a challenge.

You’ll remember the wheel bearing hubs from earlier that were covered in rust. I dropped them off at Aeroplate in Welshpool to get cleaned up. I don’t know how used they are so I’ll put them on and see if they make any noise.

I couldn’t get the first disc rotor off so figured I’d remove the disc rotors and bearing hubs together first, and then separate them after that.

Rotating the bearing hub confirmed the source of the noise. Even rotating each hub by hand was making noise. It was the same on both sides, which explains why there was so much noise when the car was being driven (ie both bearing hubs are extremely worn).

However, starting with the passenger side, the bearing hub wouldn’t slide off. I kept wrestling with the disc rotor and eventually that came loose, leaving the bearing hub behind (which is what I was trying to do in the first place).

I couldn’t get the bearing hub off. I tried various things, including two different crowbars, and couldn’t get it to budge at all.

This is where a gear puller would have come in handy. I’ve survived until now without one, and if I was going to buy one then it would need to be big enough to pull the 355 front disc rotors off. Finding something that size that I can justify buying (ie they’re expensive) is a problem.

Stuff it, I decided to remove the complete spindle (ie what the bearing hub is on) and have a go at it with my hydraulic press.

I bought that ball joint separator from the US last year via mail order. I was looking for something that would separate spindles from ball joints late at night, when I can’t use a hammer to shake it loose because of the noise.

Although I got the ball joint separator last year, tonight was the first time that I actually got to try it out. It’s an SPC Performance 37985 4-Way Ball Joint Separator.

To separate something like a tie rod end from the spindle normally requires thumping it with a hammer. The resulting vibration shakes things loose. However, late at night I can’t do this because of the noise that it makes. Hence my search last year for a ball joint separator that could separate things quietly.

Why this particular ball joint separator? I wanted something that was adjustable to suit different requirements. This one can be pulled apart and reassembled in four different ways, so it will fit into more situations than a normal ball joint separator.

YouTube clip:

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/SPC-Performance-37985-4-Way-Separator/dp/B00I5KPACK

The ball joint separator pushed the tie rod end out easily.

Then it was time for the real test - to see if the ball joint separator could separate the spindle from the ball joint.

Much to my surprise, it did it easily. Finally, something went as it should tonight.

I removed the upper control arm bolt and removed the spindle with the bearing hub still on it.

Then I tried to come up with some way of pushing the bearing hub off the spindle with the hydraulic press.

This idea was no good.

Another possibility was to push a chisel or some sort of wedge between the spindle and bearing hub but I couldn’t see that idea working out either.

Putting that spindle aside, I had a go at removing the spindle on the driver’s side.

The separator separated the spindle from the ball joint surprisingly easy.

Everything disassembled on the driver’s side.

I was determined to finish replacing the bearing hubs, so took the spindles to a nearby shopping centre carpark at 2:30am

Various thumping with a hammer achieved nothing. The bearing hubs were well rusted onto the spindles.

I put the spindles back in the car and resigned myself to the fact that this task was going to beat me tonight. I’ve only replaced front wheel bearing hubs a handful of times but they’ve slid off the spindles easily each time. I sure made up for that tonight, and I’m definitely going to have to look for a suitable gear puller.

At least I’ve got the spindles off (ie mobile) so that I can take them to a workshop with a suitable gear puller.

However, getting rid of the bearing hub noise has been something that I’ve wanted to get done since the first time I drove the car. I was extremely frustrated at not being able to get such a fairly easy job finished tonight.