How to Replace Land Rover Swivel Housings With the Britpart Kit

Hello, Welcome to Britpart. My name's Danny Hopkins, and we're here in the workshop over in deepest Shropshire. And we're looking at a component today but first I'm gonna introduce you to Paul Myers, he's the MD of Britpart. Paul, Hello. Hi. Tell us a bit about the company. Okay. Britpart is a trade wholesaler of Land Rover parts. Basically we ship parts around the world for any vehicle for a Land Rover from 1970 to brand new. And we cover virtually every part in those vehicles. Well I'm not surprised, because the site is absolutely huge here. It's an amazing site. What are we looking at today, Paul? Okay. We're looking at swivel housing repair kit. So we've got a complete kit here. With swivel housing itself, the bearings and seals, the grease, everything required to do a job. Okay. So this is the sort of centerpiece of the kit. What's this and what does it do? That's a swivel housing, that houses the CV joint and keeps the geometry of the vehicle correct. Brilliant. And this is applicable for which vehicles? There's three or four different guises of that but it fitted with all the coil spring Land Rovers really. Brilliant, brilliant. Okay. And what's special about your particular product? Very important that these are correct strength. Only way you can get the correct strength is by buying a forged product, right? Yes. Ours are the correct forged product. If you have a cast product, which is cheaper to make you will get fractures and breakage around these areas. Right, okay. This all comes in the same kit, does it? This is everything that is required to do a job the self-centering seal of its retainer. Gotcha. And what's this? This is swivel housing grease the CV joint, and a swivel, now run in a bath of grease, which reduces oil leakage. Okay. And you've got these this is a top joint and some bearings here. What did they come in the kit too? Those were two bearings you need. And a bearing raiser, the two oil seals for the axle shaft, a very important part with a pin, which holds the bearing central and effectively gives a swivel housing it's correct. angle. Brilliant. You've got the gaskets on the end there as well. All the gaskets that you require. So no more nasty oil leaks. How would you know when to actually do this Paul? What would be the sign that you need to replace your swivel joint? Typically, it will either be leakage of oil around this part of the swivel or play in the swivel housing itself. Brilliant. And this is normally caused by corrosion. Ah-ha! We had one earlier. Here's one we had earlier, which failed in MOT Yeah. As you can see, the surface has started to corrode and actually worn a ridge in it from where the seal has been rubbing. You can really feel that. Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. And there's no way that will seal again. No, that's where you need a new one. Fantastic stuff. Okay. Well, look, we're going to fit one now. We're going to go over to see Martin and Steve and see exactly how it's done. Right? The stripdown to the swivel housing is quite an involved job. There's a fair few bits to take off but none of it's too difficult. The first thing you're going to want to do is clamp the brake pipe so that when you unbolt the caliper and remove the brake line from the caliper you don't lose too much brake fluid. This particular vehicle is quite a late 300 Series Discovery. So it has ABS, which means you have to remove the ABS sensor. As they get older, they do tend to corrode in place. So it's important that you take care when removing the sensor to avoid damage. Once the caliper is lifted off you're presented with the brake disc and hub assembly. First thing to do is remove the rubber cap on the end of the dry flange underneath that is a circlet and a couple of shims. Remove the circlet with circlet pliers, and then undo the five bolts which hold the drive flange onto the end of the hub and remove the flange. With that out of the way the lock washer can be bent over on the wheel bearing. And the big 52 mill outer wheel bearing nut can be removed. When that is out, remove the shim and washer and the inner wheel bearing nut which will allow the hub to slide off the stub axle. You'll probably spill a bit of grease at this point but it's not a massive problem. You'll be putting in new grease and new bearing when it goes back together. So with that off, you're presented with another ring of bolts that hold the stub axle to the end of the hub, these bolts often have quite a lot of Loctite on, so you need to be careful when you're undoing them otherwise they can snap. Undo the ring of bolts that secure the stub axle to the hub assembly and slide the stub axle off. With that out of the way you'll be able to see inside the hub and inside the swivel housing, itself. So the next step is to unbolt the swivel housing seal sandwich plate, which is held on with a series of eight mill headed screws. And once that's off, you can then unbolt the top swivel pin slide that out of the housing, and then you'll be able to remove the hub from the swivel housing itself. The next step is unbolting the swivel housing from the axle tube. Again, as you can see the swivel housing is really disgusting. It's covered in horrible CV grease. So Steve's going to come and give that a quick cleanup so that when we go to work on that component we don't get completely covered in grease. Right, so we've just cleaned up the old swivel housing ready for removal. I think Steve's just finishing up removing the last of the ring of bolts, holding it to the axle tube and then he's going to remove the old swivel housing. There we go. Alright. So we've got the new swivel housing kit here from Britpart. Open this up. There's the new housing itself. Nice and clean, ready to go. But there's a few things we've got to do first before we install this isn't there. Yes, there is, yep. We need to fix some seals and some bearings into the housing, off the vehicle before we can fit it to the vehicle. Right. Okay. That looks like one of the bearing outers. So how do we go about putting them in? Do they go fairly easily or we're going to have to press them in? It varies time to time. Sometimes you can put them in carefully with a hammer. Sometimes you can press them in gently with a vice or maybe a press, but sometimes you even have to heat them up or sweat them in to get them into place. Right. Okay. We better start this then before we carry on with anything else. Yep. Right then. So Steve's back from fitting the upper and lower bearing races into the swivel housing. He's also slid the swivel housing sail over the back of the housing before we offer it up to the axle. Because obviously once it's been bolted on there's no way to fit the seal and the sandwich plate only fits one way. So you've got to really make sure you get that right before you bolt the housing onto the axle tube. He's also stuck the gasket onto the end of the axle with a little bit of Blue Hylomar just to stop it dropping out of place. So now it's time to fit the new housing onto the end of the axle. He's also got some new 14 mill multi splined bolts because the old ones were really rusty and probably due replacement. Okay. So, the swivel housing is now bolted to the axle tube and the next job is to hook the hub back onto the lower bearing. And it will sit in place. No problem at all. From there, the next job is to fit the top swivel pin. And as you can see there's a variety of shims that can be used. And what these shims do is determine how tightly the pins clamp the bearings and set the preload on the swivel itself. And to show you how to measure your swivel preload is Fuzz with his top tip. What I'm measuring here is rolling resistance. Now this can be used on any components on a motor vehicle that turns so here I'm using a final drive, but it could be used on a swivel or anything else, really, that rotates. Now, what I have here is a cord wrapped around this input shaft. And here I have a spring balance measured out in either kilograms or in pounds. Now there'll be an initial resistance to movement. That's the inertia. And then we'll get the rolling resistance after that. So, at the moment it's reading high. And then as I pull, when I get over that, I'll hold on I've got a little notchy bit there. Once I pull, initially there'll be a high reading but then it will settle back into the actual rolling resistance. There we go. So there's my rolling resistance. And if I look carefully that is about three pounds or whatever that is in kilograms. Okay. So once you've got your top swivel pin you want to add three or four shims, generally a good place to start. That can be then bolted into the top of the hub to bring the whole assembly together. Once it's all hung and the top two 17 mill bolts are tight you can use your fishing scales to check the preload on the hub and the figure we're aiming for on this particular vehicle is 1.1 to 1.4 kilos of force to move the swivel through its range. If the swivel's set too tight you need to add a couple of shims, maybe one at a time, trial and error to try and set the preload. If it's too loose, you need to remove a shim just to sandwich the bearings a little bit more tightly and then keep rechecking until this preload is as close as you can get it. When that's done the CV joint and half shaft can be slid back into the axle and the stub axle can be bolted on over the top with a new gasket that's held in place with six, 17 mill headed bolts. Once they're on, all tightened up then we can fill the swivel housing with a new one-shot swivel housing grease which comes with a little packet like this. And you loosen off the filler squirt the grease in and then refit the filler. Okay, so the swivel housing is now filled with one-shot grease that came in the Britpart swivel housing overhaul kit we've refitted the break disc and rotating assembly to the stub axle and set up the wheel bearing. And the drive flange has been refitted to the end of the CV joint. So Steve's just finishing refitting the brake caliper. You then got to bleed the brake system on this corner refit the wheel and road test the vehicle to confirm the fix. So for more handy tips on how to work on your Land Rover, visit the rest of the videos in the Britpart workshop series.