Beck TD, Part 41 - Bearing Woes

When you work on a really old car, especially a highly modified one like Beck TD, you are constantly dealing with decisions and work practices of "prior meatheads." I say that with full awareness that I'm the "current meathead" because I can do dumb stuff too! But this one was unexpected and unwelcome!


When I recently bought a used engine from Joe Lazenby, he suggested that I update the rear main seal to a modern neoprene version, and also replace the pilot bearing at the end of the crankshaft with a new one. I agreed, and added those parts to my order with Joe. Today, I got to that part of the project, and found quite a mess. This is a photo of the back of the crankshaft, with the pilot bearing at the center.

You can see a "meathead-induced" hole drilled along the bearing pocket, other damage to the bore, and clear evidence of JB Weld around the bearing. Yikes! I called Joe and described it to him, and he replied, "Come on - nobody's that stupid." But they were! My theory is that they were trying to get the bearing out, and failed. The bearing was in terrible shape, based on the rough, noisy action when I tried it by hand. It had to come out.

Fortunately, I had a tool that I made way back in 2014 for my BMW Z3 Coupe that was the genesis of this blog. At that time, it was the most complicated thing I had made with my machine tools, and I was pretty darn proud of it! You can read all about it at this link.

For now, you just need to know it's called an expanding collet, and its mission is to tighten into a hole and allow a slide hammer to pull hard. Here's a photo - the collet is the part with a bolt head at the right:

Troy Nace was helping me, and we had actually tried the collet before calling Joe. The bearing was so stuck that the slide hammer pulled out the collet without moving the bearing at all. But we tried again, first squirting a high-grade penetrating oil around the bearing, and tightening the collet until it must have been close to failure. And it worked! After some pretty serious hammering, the bearing came out. It's still on the collet here.

You can see the JB Weld residue all around the bearing. Next step, clean up the mess. The face of the crankshaft had several burrs that kept the flywheel from seating flat. Using a sandpaper roll in a Dremel tool and several different files, I got that cleaned up. The way to test that is to take a single edged razor blade and slide the sharp edge across the surface. When it doesn't catch on anything, you're good to go.

But wait, there's more! The drilling had left metal burrs inside too, plus there was lot of JB Weld, now as hard as iron. The photo is a bit tough to read - you're looking into the hole where the bearing seats. What we should have is a flat, round surface for the bearing to seat into. Not!

No hope of cleaning that up with hand tools. I had to steel my nerves and use a variety of bits in the Dremel, from wire wheels to carbide burrs, to clean it out. I knew I couldn't get it flat where "meathead" had drilled the hole, but as long as the rest of the area was clean and flat, and there were no burrs around the hole all should be OK. After about an hour, I had it flat enough that I could tap the new bearing in place with a 1" socket:

The new neoprene seal goes around that part of the crankshaft. Joe wants me to make a special tool to guarantee alignment of that seal, and I'm going to do that for the next engine. But for this "temporary" engine, I'm taking my chances so I can keep moving! Sorry, Joe!  UPDATE I later decided that if I did that and it leaked, I wouldn't be very happy... I made Joe's tool, detailed in Part 43 (http://emz3cp.blogspot.com/2019/05/beck-td-part-43-joes-amazing-tool.html) and it worked great! END UPDATE

This could have been an absolute show-stopper, so I'm thrilled that this worked out. On to the next task!

Continue on to Part 42....