Beck TD, Part 65: No More Jingle!

At the end of Part 64, after fixing a bad rattle in the muffler, I noted there was one more annoying noise - a "jingle" when moving. It was driving me nuts, because I couldn't find it. But now I have!


The photo below shows what was jingling - a dust shield on the flange at the nose of the rear end, as shown by the red arrow. You can see there's a gap between the flange and the dust shield, which is not right - it should rotate with the flange.

When I encounter something like this, I often turn to the exploded parts diagram on Moss Motors to see exactly what I'm looking at. But this time... the part wasn't on the diagram! I checked the diagram in the original MG TD shop manual and it's wasn't there either. In fact, there was an even clearer drawing of the rear, and it wasn't there either. The red arrow shows where it would have gone:

As it happens, I have the rear end from an MGA in the shop also - that's the model that succeeded the T-series cars. I just bought it, and it you'll hear about why someday. But for now, just note that the flange is there on that later rear end:

As I often do in cases like this, I recruited the brain trust from the Volvo-Powered MG group. Jake had a great story of a similar problem on a huge Peterbilt truck - he repaired it, and the truck was named "Jingle Bells" thereafter. Charlie provided pictures of rears from TDs, TFs, MGAs and MGBs (where does he keep all this stuff?) showing clearly that the T-series cars didn't have the shield. He wondered aloud if Cor and I had added it in Part 34 when we added the 3.9 rear gear from an MGB.

Cor called me, and said that we definitely did use it then, because that conversion required the flange and input shaft from the MGB. He also said it was a great idea to keep it, because it keeps dust out of the bearing in the nose of the rear end. 

The advice from the group was to spot-weld the dust shield onto the flange - that's how Jake fixed the Peterbilt truck also. That was a bit scary to me, because I had never welded underneath a car, which is sort of "upside down and backwards." But, there's a first time for everything, so today I carefully set everything up. Nobody there to catch a photo of that, but if you can imagine me lying under the car in a welding helmet, long-sleeved welding jacket and leather gloves, fire extinguisher by my side, with the driveshaft six inches from my face, with a very bright shop light balanced on my chest, and the cables from the welder draped across me, you have the idea.

And it worked! Three spot welds at around 120 degrees apart, and it's permanent, it doesn't rub, and it doesn't jingle. The arrows show two of the spot welds.

I didn't realize how much the rattle and the jingle bugged me until they are gone! My sense of automotive feng shui has returned. And this episode has reawakened the desire for a lift in the shop. When you see the guys on the Motor Trend network doing this sort of thing, they are standing comfortably under the car, with lighting on a stand and the welder arranged to be out of the way. How long is it until Christmas?

Continue on to Part 66....