New Wheels and Tyres

The latest purchase for the Scimitar is a Set of  Toyo T1R Proxies  to go on the 15x8 Revolution alloy wheels I've had kicking around for some time. I toyed with the idea of of Toyo R888’s for the car but the T1R’s were almost £500 by the time they got  them onto the rims, for R888’s it would be closer to £700. So for the first time ever for this build I made a rational decision and bought the tyres that cost a little less and will last longer.

With any car, never mind a high performance car  personally I never ever compromise with rubbish tyres, even your simple French hatchbacks should have decent rubber.  I used to run Bridgestone’s on my MG, then short of cash when the Bridgestone’s wore out I bought some nasty tyres from the PRC and now she slides all over the place and loses grip long before the Bridgestone’s ever would.  That’s why I bought the best for the Scimitar. In my opinion as well as every petrol drinking lunatic in Japan, Evo, Subaru and Skyline driver, Toyo rubber is pretty well received. Proxies are five star tyres, the only other tyres I rate as highly are Avon ZZ3, Dunlop Sport Maxx and Yokohama ADVAN AD08 depending on application.

The tyres are 225/45 R15 91V. This I belive is going to be the optimum size tyre for these wheels t for this car. I have increased the diameter of the wheel to 15 to incorporate the larger front brakes and the tyres have been widened to 225 to put down the extra power on the road, but these wheels have a ET40 negative offset to keep the track relatively close to original as possible and not compromise the handling of the car. With the from wheels I may need to run with some hubcentric spacers to avoid any clash conditions, obviously the increase in front track will slightly combat lateral weight transfer, however were talking mm's so not by much. 

Damaged Stub axle repair

As mentioned previously I damaged the threads of the off side stub axle extracting it from the suspension upright, this is how I repaired it. To do this, you need at your disposal a vernier caliper, the Japanese digital ones by Mitutoyo are the best available, you will also need a thread chaser, a die wrench, a a good quality carbide cutting tool, and a decent Lathe. The Lathe I repaired this on is an old 1970's Colchester Triumph 2000, a fantastic well built lathe.

I started by locking the stub axle into the three jaw, and making sure its  centred, you can clock it if you think it’s totally necessary, but I know this three jaw chuck is pretty centre so I didn’t bother.

I then proceeded to cut a small taper into the end of the stub axle  using the cross slide with a carbide cutting tool cutting no more than 5 thou deep, just to take the threads of the damaged end, turning at around 425 with plenty of water soluble suds.

I then ran a thread chaser, 24 TPI UNF through the remaining threads just to increase the definition of the remaining threads on the end of the axle to help with the next step.

 

Pinning a die wrench with a ½ 24 TPI UNF die between the tailstock the and job with the wrench handle jammed against the bed, I slowly proceeded to turn the tail stock leaver and the headstock simultaneously  by slowly by hand keeping the die straight until it bites onto the first thread and begins to cut. This ensures an clean straight cut thread perfectly incline with the old one.

It worked and a cleaned the thread up and threaded a new nut on just to make sure it was nice and tight, Good as new! Danaged stub axle repaired.