grease deez

 The new alternator arrived yesterday, and I installed it. I subsequently discovered a few things. Firstly, the car still does the zombie run-on thing. Secondly, all my alternators are junk, but the original one with which I started is still the best one. The new one charges at 13-odd volts, where the original one just barely did 12.5, and the other two just lay there gasping. So worn brushes on them all, and the original problem of not shutting off with the headlights off still persists. I think this is a wiring problem, those butt connectors are connecting some things that I don't think are supposed to be connected, but everything works fine with the lights on. So that's how it's going to be. 

I have been through pretty much the whole car at this point, except the front wheel bearings, which I have never examined. I popped off the driver's side dust cap and found grease, but it was pretty old, with a big old cracked cakey pile on the inside of the cap. I pulled off the whole hub and got to cleaning with some doomed rags and acetone. The spindle on the driver's side looks really good.

I do not have new seals, and apparently you also are supposed to use new nuts, which I will explain shortly. 

But working heavily on the old grease with acetone and air disposed of most of it, and then it was time for the fun part. 

Back to the nuts. Fiat uses a "preload for dummies" approach which involves torquing to 14.5 ft lbs to seat everything, backing off to 5 ft lbs, then loosening the nut 30° by scribing a mark on the thrust waster midway between corners of the nut then rotating the right corner of that face of the nut over to the scribe mark. Then using a special tool, the nut is staked down over two grooves on the end of the spindle

 

Usually this involves a slightly more sane approach using a castle nut and a cotter pin, but one works with the engineering with which one has been presented. Lacking new nuts or the special Fiat tool, I commenced to hammering with a ball peen and a punch (which I suspect is all the special tool actually is), and after a long while of hammering and having the nut move, I managed to get it staked down to what appears to be an acceptable level, and added a couple of big divots on each side for good measure. Pondering the troubles here though, I held off on side 2 and I think I'm going to order some new spindle nuts. Poking around on Amazon, they say a set meant for Subarus fit a 78 Spider with a 5-speed, so I guess we'll see.

 

There really isn't time to do anything else. I'll repack the passenger side, use the old nut, then just swap them out when the new nuts arrive, and I'll be driving those nuts and not these nuts.  

 

UPDATE: The new nuts didn't fit, oh well. I did the passenger side after dinner today, and found it to be in not great shape. There was red grease squirted in on top of a residue of old black grease, and precious little of both. The seal is probably not working too well any more. I cleaned it out and found a chip out of a roller in the outer bearing as well, but, other than that, things looked ok, and as a bonus it had a very newish-looking nut on that side. 

 

  

So I cleaned everything thoroughly, repacked it all in fresh grease, then found to my utter annoyance that my little torque wrench only clicks one way, and since this is a left-hand thread, no click. (I realized I don't even know if they make double-sided torque wrenches.) I estimated it by tightening it until it just barely took a click to get it off again, and I hope that's close enough for Fiat work. The hub felt ok after that, similar to the driver's side. Surely, he said hopefully, it will last for 1800 miles more. 

 

This concludes the time I have to fix anything, and the car will henceforth have to fend for itself. I feel pretty good about it though. Next is packing and logistics, then the game is afoot.