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MG Midget and Sprite Technical - stub axle

Chaps....Santa bought me a book "expert guide to midgets and Sprites" published by RAC. It was written by Terry Horler, and describes what can go wrong with your Spridget [it has lots of pages...]
BUT it mentions that stub axles for disc braked cars has a larger diameter lower bearing than the drum brake stub axle"..... yet the usual suppliers and my original parts list makes no mention of this.
Any comments??
David Cox

Yes that is the case and it was discussed in a thread last year. IIRC the top bush is 5/8" in both cases but the lower bush for the disc brake car is 25/32" so I took the opportunity to purchase a bargain new machine reamer off ebay last year for when I come to do mine again. When the OP asked about the journal sizes I measured one of my kingpins and they weren't a nice fractional size and realised the machine shop had ground the journals to suit the bushes rather than ream them with the correct reamer they claimed to have.

The thread should be from around August/ early September last year.
David Billington

David,

The thread was titled "King Pin Reamer Sizes" there may be others and was back in 5/11/2015 which gave the details, the thread last year was talking about longevity and a bit of size information was mentioned.

You'll have to find the thread as the link get converted from http to https and doesn't work.
David Billington

The part numbers are different for disk brake and drum brake models.
richard b

thanks both. I'll look into the archives...
David Cox

<< Sprite and early Midget (ie front drum brakes):
Kinpin
top journal diameter 5/8" (0.625") (15.85mm)
bottom journal diameter 11/16" (0.6875") (17.46mm)

Later Midget (ie front disc brakes):
Kingpin
top journal diameter 5/8" (0.625") (15.85mm)
bottom journal diameter 25/32" (0.781") (19.83mm) >>

found it.

Thanks all....
Dave
David Cox

...of course, the question now is: what size are in mine?? They are greased regularly to within an inch of their lives and there is no play and steering self-centres well enough so let sleeping dogs lie??
David Cox

I don't see there is any way you can mix the parts. If you have drum brakes it will only go together with the skinny kingpin and the drum brake 4 bolt pattern hub carrier.
A later disc braked 3 bolt hub carrier would flap around if fitted to an earlier king pin. And the later fatter kingpin simply won't fit into the drum brake hub carrier.

The one I wouldn't know about is the combination for the early Girling type disc brakes ones. Rare, I think?
GuyW

thanks, Guy..another case of "engage brain before putting fingers on keyboard"...!
David Cox

This thread was discussed between 30/01/2018 and 31/01/2018

MG Midget and Sprite Technical index

This thread is from the archive. The Live MG Midget and Sprite Technical BBS is active now.