How To Replace Kingpin Bushing And Assemble An Early Ford Front Suspension

hey guys matt iron drop garage and today we are working on the schroll 32 project again so i made big progress again last video where i got all those subrail sections made for the body and we're pretty much ready to go there so when we go to put the body onto the frame i have that whole substructure built and all we need to do is just make some bracketry to actually attach it to the body and we have a good strong square solid body that will be good to go for taking it on and off so we are getting kind of close to that point surprisingly just to start test fitting stuff but what i need to work on next is i sent away a bunch more parts basically that whole front end which you can see hanging behind me off to my buddy brook to have it blasted uh he was able to fit me in again thank you brooke and get this all blasted which was really great and uh since then what i've done is i've just sprayed everything down as soon as i got it back with eastwood fast etch to basically etch all the metal uh it leaves like a phosphoric coating on the metal and basically it will not rust the same thing we sprayed on the frame that way we can work around all the parts without them just instantly flash rusting and causing us to have to blast the stuff again before we start uh painting and doing all that so it's kind of a tough situation with this car uh one part of me wants to just paint all epoxy prime and paint all this stuff and then put it together to do our next batch of mock-ups but what i've had happen to me in the past is i get kind of overzealous with making things painted when i'm doing a car that's a little more refined and then when you get to the end of the project the front axle and all the parts that you painted early on are all chipped up and messed up because you've taken them on and off they sat around the shop all that kind of stuff and it causes problems so what i think i'm going to do this time around on this project i try and learn on every one of these projects i do because i'm just you know learning as i go like everybody else and what i think i'm going to do is leave all this stuff in fast edge i'm going to work on today getting the whole front axle reassembled together so that we can at least do the car as a roller and mock-up stage so i'm going to work on getting new kingpin bushings in these freshly blasted spindles uh ream those out with with my uh with my reamer get the kingpins in fitting good get everything put together and kind of working correctly i'm not going to go crazy putting the bridge shoes and all that stuff in because we will be blowing it all back apart and painting it kind of all at the same time and that's that's what i think will work best instead of me trying to piecemeal and and turn the corner of my shop into a spray booth in the middle of the winter i think what i'm going to do is just i have it all in fast etch let's put it together and keep moving forward instead of trying to switch gears and turn it into a paint shop in here which is going to be totally a mess so i'm going to get these spindles in the vise show you guys how to quickly and easily do these with basically a vise and a reamer and then we can start putting our axle together all right so we're going to walk you through the basic process for doing kingpin bushings and fitting kim ping new kingpins and bushings to an early ford spindle now the process is basically the same from model a's all the way up to like f1 pickup trucks and really any straight axle vehicle uh whether it's ford or not the process is darn near identical it's just maybe some different specialty tools or different things that you do so for this we have a round back spindle uh why i have a dirty one in my hands is i knocked the bushings out off camera before when i was prepping everything for uh the blaster and um i knocked those out didn't film the process because i was just in the group of things so i'm going to show you knocking a kingpin bushing out real quick on this just old spindle i have here it's all dirty this is the same as the ones that are on the stroll 32 coupe these round back spindles came on 30 36 to 39 uh early fourths now one thing to mention a little side tangent 36s are like a one year only and the uh snout of the of the spindle is actually a little bit different and the snout on the drum is actually a little longer so they're one year only spindles uh just double check that if you're buying at a swap meet or something like that you don't get mismatched or get the wrong one because they don't really work with like 40 style drums or 46 to 48 drums so that is that but spindle process and the bushing process is basically the same for all of them there's a little bushing when they're dirty it's really hard to see but there's a little real thin bushing in there and so and it's recessed on on the bottom here a little bit that you might kind of be able to see probably not but what i do is i'm going to do basically the whole process here in the vice not basically i am going to do the whole process in the vise i've used the press before and it works just fine but i found over the years that the vice method just is like the simplest and just works for me now if i was doing this in like a production shop i'd probably have something set up in the press and it would work just fine but with this it just kind of the old school way works really fine so if you have a decent vise you can do this whole process with a couple of tools so the first thing we're going to need to do is drive these old bushings out then we're going to swap over to our new ones so there's a couple tools you can use for driving these bushings out that can make your life either really easy or kind of a pain in the ass so you can do the really crude method of grabbing an old socket that matches the diameter of your kingpin bushing and using it as a sacrificial punch or driver or drift that does work but it's kind of hard to find the right size socket and i found it over the years it just i did it a couple times that way it's not great so what i did first was i machined up just a little bushing driver that is like basically the same uh just undersized of the diameter of the bushing since this bushing is really thin you don't have a lot of room to play around with uh before it gets too small and it starts kind of driving into the bushing so we have this and i just left the head a little larger and this extra lip here i left is actually the size that the um the bigger truck kingpin bushings are so if i need to knock those bushings out this will actually slide down through and will fit there so you can use that this has worked great it's it's been abused over the years you can see the head's a little mushroomed i've used this on a lot of spindles then my dad gave me this he reminded me that the one drawer in the toolbox that i inherited from my dad when he retired had some specialty tools in it and my dad was a big truck or truck mechanic and over the years at different jobs he had he had some ford trucks that were straight axle and he had like f1 trucks and stuff that he worked on and he had some specialty tools that the old timers had given him and they've been passed down and i didn't even know i never looked at him so he had this driver that was in the box that i just recently found didn't even know it was in there in the back of the box after reminding me and this has all a couple of different size drivers on here that you can use and this one actually works really well for doing kingpins as well so you can use it that way you can drop it down like that and it also works that way so you can either get a driver there's there's kd tools and kara wilson tools that are made specifically for this that work great but this method works totally fine i've used this a bunch of times and it works well so basically all we're going to do is try and center it get a little mini sledge or bfh and uh and just start hammering and try and drive it out straight is basically the process so i'm going to use this guy first my one i made let's get some safety glasses on and then we'll start hitting all right got my safety glasses on we're going to use my little driver i made first i'll show you that way i usually try and get one or two good hits to get it moving and then once i've identified that it's moving i'll just start [Applause] driving it down and you can probably see already down here it's started to punch through that quick so the key is to get one or two good hits to make sure you're very square and hitting straight down and that will kind of get it moving once it gets moved and you can kind of fit your driver into the hole it's it's super easy to knock it out from there so now that we got started i can just [Applause] boom done that's it process simple easy so there's our kingpin bushing all knocked out i didn't even check this way not these bushings could have been okay but not a big deal i wanted to show you guys anyways so there's one knocked out with that flip this over all right so we got it flipped over and a lot of times what i do when i flip these over uh is i work from the bottom here because like we mentioned when i showed it to you it's a little recessed on the bottom so it's a little easier to get your drift tool started dang just that's it there's our other bushing all knocked out and that's all they are nothing to them so we're gonna put this one back in the bin for a rainy day so to speak and uh we'll start with the nice fresh clean ones and show you guys putting the new bushings in [Applause] all right so we got our first spindle in the vice here and we are ready to go so kingpins campaign sets i personally prefer to find good old american-made kits if possible or if you're kind of piecing something together reuse a good original kingpin that isn't warm nice thing with the kingpins are is that the bushings are pretty much sacrificial so when when they go bad as long as the car hasn't been driven really really far to where the bushings are totally shot usually the bushings wear and not the kingpins themselves so you can kind of reuse those kingpins as long as they're not damaged but obviously you want to check those out michael make sure that they're not too off but so i like doing that because i've had a few instances where i tried to use the chinese ones off ebay speedway wherever and those kits i found the kingpins are just have let's say one to three times i've had it happen where the kingpin was slightly bigger than what it was supposed to be so i used a blue point or a factory ford style tool that just is one size a reamer that just runs it through and boom you're done and i've had it where i've done that and then i have to get adjustable reamer and open it up just a little bit which adds an extra step so for me i try and seek out these old kits because they are just a little bit better the old usa made kits so i have a kingpins in here and uh where we have is our new bushings that are here so these bushings like in these old kits now this is an extra step they've been sitting around so what i need to do is just clean off the bushings because there's a little bit of like dirt corrosion whatever from sitting in a damp box for way longer than i've been alive so i'm going to clean these off and then we're going to do is actually drop these in and start putting these bushings in and i'll show you the process along the way all right so i've been doing is just taking a little green scuff pad and running over the bushings just to take that just any dirt or whatever that could be on the bushings that could cause a problem driving them in and we have a nice clean bushing here i've done kind of the same on the inside as well so that's pretty good the other thing i've done is sprayed down my opening here for the bushing with some pre now if you don't have a spindle that has been blasted you're going to definitely want to do this i ran i cleaned this up already with with a scuff pad and some pre when i took it all apart and then i left the kingpin in it and taped it all up so it didn't get a lot of media in there but i still like to go through there and just make sure that everything is cleaned up and good but if you have an old spindle you may have grease and dirt and corrosion and depending on how long it's at you may have to clean that up a little bit so i clean that out with some pre we're good to go there then i take some some oil i just have this kind of all-purpose penetrating oil and i will drop a little bit on the bushing itself here and then i will drop a little bit in our opening here when you're putting this bushing in probably the one of the first mistakes i ever made just being overzealous is there is a hole in this bushing that hole needs to line up with the grease fitting in your spindle if you have it turned your your grease fitting can't do anything it won't it'll just push the grease out so you need to make sure you get that lined up or pretty darn close so that when you pound that down through it's lined up with our grease fitting so when we grease our kingpins we're actually getting grease in there and it is doing its job so now that i have that in there like that i will usually kind of stand over top like this and i will try and get it lined up if you have a helper now you can get a second set of high eyes that's always nice so depending how confident you're feeling you can just use your little mini sledge or hammer or whatever tap this down and get it started all we're doing is trying to get this bushing started so it's kind of going the right way but you want to try and make sure that it's going straight you can drive these in crooked because they're fairly soft if you swing a hammer hard enough you can drive these suckers in crooked and it will fight you the whole freaking way down then it'll be deformed to the top will be messed up and then it's just it's just a nightmare so what i like to do um is take a lot of times just a block of wood like this and just give it a little little tap get that down there like this and that will get the bushing kind of started so the bushing is in it's good i've hit it hard enough that it started to drive the bushing down in just enough that's not going to fall out then what we can do and again i'm showing you guys a super simple way you could definitely do this in a press certainly do this in a press um but what i i what you can do is put this right in the vice like this and i'm gonna take you guys off the camera stand here i'll show you you can see i have it in the vise and this vise i have this works perfect for doing these so it fits in like that and i have this sitting nice and flat on the jaws of my vise and then what i can do is just take my handle and slowly turn this and it's kind of like a poor man's press so i'm just slowly pushing that in as long as you don't have this kingpin bushing started crooked uh this should go pretty easy i'm not using really hardly any force to push this bushing in so i'm going to keep going down with that and i'm going to probably pull it out of the vise here in a couple of turns i probably for being shaky here i'm going to be a camera guy and uh the mechanic so got that pretty much flush like that and pretty good now it's sitting just a hair right there just a little bit and on the bottom side the bottom there it's actually it's pretty hard to see but it's it's actually just recessed a tiny bit so what i will do is take my little driver tool that we drive that we drive these out with i will take this and just give one or two light wax on that and that will drop it down the other way you can check is i have this piece of filler rod here but we could see i'm really close because i could fit something through there and my grease fitting hole lines up with um with our bushing grease hole so really it's probably okay right here but i don't like this to stick up any um above we want this to pretty much be nice and flush so like i said i usually give it like one more whack or so and that will knock it down just enough to make it flush here and then we're usually pretty good and our grease hole is really close so it'll be perfect after we give it one light little whack with the uh with my driver here [Applause] there we go it's flush that's all it took so a couple little hits and we are good our bushing is just below flush there just recessed this is flush right here so should be good so we got our first bushing in do the same process on the bottom i'm going to actually do all the bushings and the spindles and that way we can just go swap over to reaming all the bushings and we'll show you that along the way all right so we got all the bushings in only took a few minutes to do each one and uh we're all good to go so now we are ready to actually um start cutting our bushings and getting them ream to size so um what we have here is my ancient it's blue point i was trying to remember as i was talking in the beginning of the video it's an old blue point one i got a set of these at an old like i get a lot of stuff an old auction of an old dirt racer guy that was uh that had passed away and they were selling off his stuff i got a lot of really neat stuff there but one of the things i got was a whole bin of these old blue point uh reamers for different vehicles so i have them for the big truck fords i have for chevy i have a bunch of different ones but i use the heck out of obviously this ford one and the nice thing with these are is they actually locate you in so that you can it locates you right down in here i don't know if you guys can see there but take it off the stand here so what it does is it locates this lower one is just a little smaller here so it can drop down and get you located into the bottom bushing what that does it gives you a true cut straight through so you don't want to just use a reamer where you're cutting one at a time you need something that locates so if you can have a if you're using an adjustable rim or try and get one that will allow you to locate down this bottom bushing so as you're cutting this you're cutting true because if you cut this one even a fractional uh fractionally crooked i don't know if that's even a term but if you cut that one slightly crooked to this one or not true to the two of these then you're gonna have to open up one or the other and then you're gonna have a little bit of slop in your kingpin just from the geckos that's not good so that's why these ones if you can find them the ones that are actually made for specifically for a ford i think you can buy them even reproduction but um that's that's the style that i try and seek out and with how little we use these compared to like a dealership or something back in the day where they're doing these all the time um it's unlikely you're gonna wear one of these out in your lifetime unless it's already worn out so i have that in there uh what i do is take some more of this cutting fluid a lubricant and drop it down in there we want to make sure that everything's lubricated the best we can so you drop it down the flutes there all around like so and then if you have a tool or you can just find a 12 point socket that fits and what you want to do in a ratchet so all we're going to do is just slowly push down lightly and ratchet it as we go so i'm putting a little bit of force down like this to kind of help it because it's not like threads where it's going to just automatically like run itself down in these bushings actually did oh there we go so see how that just dropped real fast like that and i'll take you off the stand again you can see it didn't seem like i was cutting a lot but you could see all the the remnants of the bushing that fell through so i cut through that top layer and it dropped me right down and we are located into the bottom one and then the top here is the size of our kingpin so because of that it's locating us at the top and then we're cutting true at the bottom so that's why i'm pushing these tools rather than doing it with an adjustable reamer i think it's easier less room for error only i get worried about is it will kind of just fall through so i want to and i want to drop my tool on the concrete and chip it so clean cutting there we go oh there it goes that fit through now my tool has a little lip right there so it does catch a little bit but i always get scared about that i'm gonna freaking drop the tool but all right here we go nice cut we can boil off all our shavings [Music] okay so now i already cleaned my kingpins same deal i just went over them with the with that scuff pad just to knock any light corrosion it could be on there and we want to just put a night film on the kingpin there we go so you want it to be you know see it's not just falling down through i mean it it's like a nice slow there we go it's not like it's like super loose but drops down see how it drops and it fits right into the bottom one boom that's what we want no play nice and tight we can you know it takes a little tiny bit of force to pull it there but it is really good so that's what we want that's it's a good good fit there for that kingpin so that's why using that tool is really handy so got this one cut take it out of ice and we'll do the other one and then we are ready to start reassembling the front axle for mock-up all right next thing i'm doing now that we have everything blasted and cleaned uh these spring perches or wishbone perches uh depending on the year you're using it but in this case it's a spring perch as well uh on these because you remember when we were knocking these out we had to use heat and i'd use the um i had to use the air drift to knock these out and also it was a little hard to get everything off i'd use the impact what ends up happening these get corroded and even if you're knocking these out using heat and stuff it can get just slightly deformed at the threads at the very end here and i know on these uh just when i was putting together it said to get blasted i could barely get these on by hand and had to use a wrench even though everything was all seemed to be cleaned up so what i like to do is i got this a little while ago i'm sure you could buy these brand new but again i like old stuff so i found this one it's an old delagard brand made in usa this is a fine thread tapper that you can actually open up and put it over a bolt i use i got this mainly because a lot of times when i get early ford uh steering boxes the end threads when you tighten the nut on to hold the steering wheel on are almost always boogered up from people trying to hammer the steering column and different stuff like that and what you're able to do with this is get below the boogered up thread so it works well in this case and this is 5 8 18 which is actually the same size as the thread on the steering box on early forward and you can basically get it down below and get it on the you know the first thread that'll you'll feel it kind of fit on to oh there there we go like that and then you tighten this knob down and it pinches it down and i get it basically as tight as i can get it by hand without going crazy he-man tight and get that tightened down there and then the way you do is you actually tap from the bottom so i put a little bit of lubrication on here and you basically just run it up as you go so it's another one of these neat tools i got this one off ebay actually i couldn't find one locally at my local flea markets and stuff and i was looking for a good old one with fine thread so i just went on ebay and i got these they're on ebay all the time i think i might have paid 20 bucks or something for this but i use the crap out of this thing for the for fixing these old original parts it's really cool to to instead of buying new chinese you know questionable suspension parts we can use the old stuff and a lot of times it just takes some cleaning up so here we just got to clean the threads up and i could feel there at the end it's definitely got some little funky threads so just thread it all the way off there until we're all the way off and now we have you can see it took some gunk off the end there was definitely a little bit of something on those threads there that were a little boogered up so the nuts sometimes need it too just depending on how corroded they were how hard they came off oh wow actually that's really nice that's what we want so this is pretty good i can see this nut right when it gets to about there it's getting a little difficult so it's not the threads on the perch it's actually probably this at this point so we got good threads on our purchase here so everything will go together real nice so i'm going to get a tap out i'll just run just a standard tap through these through these nuts and then we should be good to go to start putting our suspension or our front axle and stuff back together so all right so now that we have our spindles and our bushings all taken care of we can uh start putting these all together as a reminder i am going to be pulling this all apart to repaint it but we need to kind of set everything up to mock the car up in bare metal uh so i need to put good bushings and everything in it to get everything set right so on these on these later uh spindles versus the early ones the early axles uh and spindles the bushing actually goes or i'm sorry that the bearing actually goes on top like this and then the kingpin down goes down over top of it a little different on the on the uh the later ones like this the the bearing actually goes on the bottom and you want to make sure that the opening if you're unsure just remember you don't want water and mud and crap to go into your bearing so you want to put that side down so put that side down and then this will go like this and actually fit over like so that's how that's supposed to go now what what you need to do from here is you may need to shim your spindle to get it to fit see how there's a little rock in that i know i don't have the kingpin in there but i can tell that it's probably going to need like maybe one shim in there i'm not sure yet so we could drop our kingpin down i'll put a little seal here it's a little seal you put over the top little kind of like cap that goes over there and it has a little felt like washer if you will this guy will should drop down so everything's clean and lubricated and just cut it all fits really nice so it's a tiny bit of slack in there i might be able to fit one one bushing in there or one little washer so what they are is these little spring i think they're spring steel i'm not really sure but they're these little paper thin shims that go will go in between your spindle in here and you could space it out so i'm going to start up here and see if i can put one in between there and that will kind of tell me what we need so this is a little bit of a dance to make this happen because it is a really tight fit so you want to that look at that that way that's fitting there and now we can put our bearing back in like so and the bearing will be a little tight to fit you may need to use a mallet see but if i wiggle it hopefully we can get it to fit and this does need to be a pretty darn tight fit because you don't want extra slop in the spindle [Music] there you go the only thing i didn't check so we may need to rotate our kingpin to get it to hit the lock but for now what we're going to do is just i can since everything's nice and lubed i can spin that now we're going to look for is all right that's good no wobble took one shim that's what we want so we took this apart it actually had more shims in it and i don't know if somebody had shimmed it along the way because of some kingpin bushings that were bad sometimes people will think that it's kim ping uh it'll think that it needs more shims and it's actually the bushing is bad but that's really tight so i think that's pretty good so i'm gonna get this lined up here right about there and we can put our little lock back in tap that in it'll find its home there you go just have to spin the kingpin a little bit [Applause] now some of these uh some of these don't always sit totally flush that's something i'll mention factory ones usually sit pretty flush but sometimes these after-market ones don't always sit totally flush it'll it'll go in close to flush once we drive it in but um we don't have to go too crazy because again this is kind of a mock-up so got that set on everything's good nice and tight good to go we can move on the other side [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so that was a full day of work getting the front axle all built up and everything good i ended up going back and chasing all the threads for all the fasteners to held everything together actually quickly set the toe in on the front axle as well while i was in the vice i could kind of get it in the ballpark pretty good by myself so that was all stuff that i think is going to help me down the road when i take everything apart it'll go back together a lot easier and stuff will be closed and should fit pretty well now why did i put the frame back down on four wheels with this rusty rear back underneath of the car the reason is i want to get the rear radius rod situation sorted out they had those radius rods that are welded to the rear which is um okay but in the front they just had like threaded rod with a loose nut that just kind of like floated around in there that was not good so i want to cut all that off make some sort of brackets using the like angle iron that they had for a like mount and just beef it up a little bit put some some rod ends on it so we can actually adjust it and get everything kind of sitting a little bit better and definitely a little bit safer so i'm going to work on that in the next video and then we can eventually start blowing the rear apart we can bring the body in here soon and set that down and get that welded onto the sub rails we need to work on engine and trans mounts and uh and all of that stuff so i got a bunch of stuff i'm trying to juggle while still keeping progress going and get parts ordered ahead of time it's it's a lot of work on this car to kind of keep everything all the all the balls in the air at the same time so that's all i have for this one i appreciate you guys following along hopefully you found the front axle assembly helpful if you're going to be tackling this there's a handful of tips and tricks in there that should help you out thanks guys catch you later [Music] you

Channel: IronTrap Garage

Views: 26,260

Rating: 4.9626389 out of 5

Keywords: irontrap, iron trap, iron trap garage, irontrap garage, matt murray, hot rod, street rod, rat rod, traditional hot rod, barn find, barn find hunters, kustom, trog, the race of gentleman, vlog, the hamb, jalopy journal, model a, model t, roadster, coupe, picking, american pickers, early ford, ford, 1932, front axle, 5 window, assembly, straight axle, kin pin bushing, replacement, reaming, how to, diy

Id: an1GePbM9U8

Length: 38min 19sec (2299 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021