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Registered: August 27th, 2002
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posted on April 21st, 2004 at 03:21 PM
Rebuilding split bus spindles
Greetings All,
I’m doing some dropped spindles for Ross (Splitnut) and I
took some photos of this set so thought I’d post a tech talk
on rebuilding splitbus spindles. Really, I guess you rebuild
the kingpins in the spindles.
This set of spindles had fairly knackered king pins. As bad as
they could get yet still be barely salvageable. Kingpins
knocking and moving all over the joint. Pic of one of the
kingpins (after disassembly) below. Note wear and how its
been chopping into the brass bushing. You can actually see
fragments of brass embedded in the kingpin.
After clean up. Took as much off this king pin as you
practically can. Need to leave some radius at the top to
prevent cracking and don’t want to chop through the
hardened outer (it would be induction hardened but
hardening depth is dependent on frequency – still seems OK
this far in, hardening may be as deep as a crank journal).
It’ll get to the stage where we start hard chroming those
that are really cactus ($$$$) in order to be able to keep
busses on the road. Don’t chuck yer shot spindles and
kingpins. We’ll need em one day and everything can be
saved with enough work!
Turned up new oversize brass bushings, fitted to spindles
and reamed. Nice out-of-focus shot. Reaming is a bit of a
drag – for me I like to ‘creep up on it’ and this involves
probably six test assemblies with a turn on the reamer in
between.
Finished rebuilt spindle. In this case dropped 3.5 inches
courtesy after a bit more machining work.
