Project Marina, Driveline Service

With the driveshaft all fresh and clean, all I needed to do was crawl under the car and refit it. While under there though, I thought it prudent to replace the last remaining fluids.

Refitting the driveshaft was easy enough. I reused the old bolts but invested in some new locknuts to secure them.

It turned out that the new center bearing has different sized captive nuts, so the old bolts wouldn’t work. I got fed up with having to guess and buy bolts one by one, as all my stocks of spare bolts are of course Metric, and the Marina is Imperial, so ended up buying a kit of various sized Imperial nuts, bolts and washers from Trademe.

With the driveshaft completely refitted I moved on to changing the driveline fluids. Both the gearbox and diff call for a GL5 EP90, which as it turns out, is a bit harder to find locally. I chose to go with a Castrol Axle EPX 80W90 instead, which is a GL5 spec EP oil.

The gearbox was easy to drain and fill. The fill plug, which you should remove first, is on the RH side. Just a normal imperial square, as is the drain plug on the bottom.

The old fluid, which has been in there for at least 25 years, wasn’t as bad as it could be. It had a few years to settle at the bottom and was thick with a dark grey hue, that later changed to a dark brown. No chunks though, so that’s a win.

I pumped some fresh fluid through to help shift anything sitting on the bottom, and refit the drain plug. Just a smidgen over 1L was pumped into the box, and when it started to dribble out I refit the fill plug. A quick clean and that part of the job was done.

Next was the rear diff. This was a bit of a pain as there is no drain plug, only a large fill plug.

I tried a large syringe but it was taking way too long, so not wanting to be defeated, I grabbed the handheld vacuum bleeder.

And I’ll be, it worked a treat. Still slow because the waste fluid bottle is only about 100mls, but it flowed easily after a few pumps of the handle.

After getting as much as I could out, which was about 10 bottles of gross, almost black, stinky fluid that had likely been in there since it was built almost 50 years ago, I filled it with about 1L of fresh new fluid.

Once again, refit the fill plug, clean it off and done.

Now that I had the driveshaft in, I could do something that hadn’t happened in a VERY long time…. see if the driveline works.

The first step was to install the pedal rubbers

Mmm fresh. I did that now, because it’s way easier to do without the seat installed, which was next on the list.

What does having a seat installed mean? Sitting making vroom vroom noises of course!

Then I fired the engine up, put it into gear, and eased the clutch out.

It works! For the first time in 10-25 years, the hubs spun under their own power. Ignore the angry tractor idle, I really need to warm it up and give it a decent run, but I can’t do that until we are out of the garage.

So, when is that I hear you ask. Well, the wheels need to go off and be blasted and powder coated, and then the new tyres can be fitted. Once that’s done, on the car they go, and the car can FINALLY come down off the stands it’s been on since I got it.

For now, I’ll just be here reading my original Leyland Australia parts catalogue from 1975

Which is pretty handy really, since it shows me how things like the heater/vent ducting go together since currently it’s all in a box and I had no idea.

It’s completely different to the Uk cars, and the heater box is actually the same as the Aus built Mini Clubman of the time.

Soon.