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Old 06-14-22, 12:38 AM
  #20  
ajh.me
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Hi VonC,

Thanks for the research. Your front seems to be the same as mine, at least on the outside. The web pictures show a different axle design. The axle design on mine, and presumably yours too, has a five piece axle: endcap, stub axle, spacer, stub axle, endcap. If you're not careful (or stupid, like me), you can push the stub axles too far into the spacer and have to pull it out, as I describe below.

Finished my reassembly last night. The front was troublesome, but I had time. The rear was trivial.

On the rear, the bearings were easily pushed onto the endcap/stub axle, mostly by hand but I finished them with a socket over the axle in the vise. The axle/bearing assemblies were pressed onto the spacer using a large C-clamp since my vise wasn't big enough. Then the whole thing is inserted into the right side and pressed home. I used various sockets and large washers to apply pressure to the outer races when pressing into the hub. With nothing big enough to reach around the whole wheel, I just put it on the floor and used a hammer above. It doesn't take much force, just tap the socket square.

The front was a pain. I managed to push the stub axles into the spacer during disassembly so that only 9-10 mm were exposed, leaving only 1-2mm for the endcap after the 8mm bearing. Tapping it out was impossible so I fabricated a puller by filing flats on 4mm (or 10-32) flange nut so it would fit inside the axle and then flip to catch the inside of the stub axle. I also drilled out a steel washer to fit EXACTLY over the stub to bear against the spacer. I intended to thread a screw through washers, sockets, etc into the nut to pull the stub out of the spacer, but it was too damn tight. I ended up using a fair bit of propane before tapping against the flange nut with a drift to get 15mm or so of stub axle out of the spacer on each side

I didn't want to risk pushing the stubs back into the spacer when press fitting the bearing so I left the flange nut inside and used it to pull the bearing onto the stub on one side. With one bearing on, I put that into the hub body, pushing on the outer race with a socket and washers. I may have taken the flange nut out and used a larger bolt as a puller, or I might have just tapped with a hammer. It wasn't difficult. I again used the flange nut to pull the other bearing into place.

Finally, I used the flange nut to pull one endcap into place, removed it and pressed the last endcap with the quick release. Before this final press, I marked a line on the stub axle where it met the bearing inner race and checked that that line did not move as I pressed the endcap in place.

This was tedious.

Additional notes about the flange nut puller: first, a "flange nut" is a hex nut formed with a flange that acts to spread the load as a washer would. I was lucky that I had a flange nut that matched the OD of the stub axle perfectly and all I had to do was to file parallel flats on the flange so that it would slip inside the stub axle. I also knocked some corners off of the hex nut so that it could flip over once inside the spacer. Sand the edges smooth so that it won't catch on inside edges of the stub.

To pull on the flange nut, I used a long, fully threaded bolt with a nut run all the way to the head and threaded that into the flange nut after passing through the washers, sockets or whatever spacers needed. I would then tighten the nut against the spacers to pull against the flange nut inside the axle.
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