The Project Pad

Ask and ye shall receive! Of course you have to ask at the right time, if you'd asked a day earlier I wouldn't have anything to show...

Behold:

What you're looking at is a cruise actuator that I pulled from an old Saab 900 I stripped maybe 15 years ago. Yes, I'm a little bit of a packrat. :wink: It's held to the pedal bracket with a miserable-looking but functional bracket I cobbled up. Of the three holes in the bracket, the rightmost one as you can see ended up in the wrong place, but the left two now have bolts in them. The left bolt goes through an existing hole in the pedal bracket - I had to drill a hole for the right-hand one.

The actuator was installed in the Saab about the same as you see here - it's connected to the throttle pedal with a chain like the ones used on light sockets. In the Saab, the fitting on the end of the chain just hooked over the throttle cable where it attached to the pedal - as you can see in the 80 I had to drill a small hole through the pedal and put in a screw and some hardware to hold the chain end.

I also put in a brace going to the steering column support to better hold it against the reaction force from it pulling on the pedal:


And that's pretty much it! Of course the vacuum hose will need to be connected but I'm confident I'm up to that challenge. You'll also notice the HVAC box is not installed in the car - I have to admit since I got the actuator installed I haven't test-fit the box to see if it'll clear. If you MG'ers here in the Northeast hear a bloodcurdling scream just after dinnertime tonight, you'll know it didn't fit.

Update: IT CLEARS! No problem at all, the closest it comes to the HVAC box is about 1-1/4". See:

Hey... does anyone know what rims these are?

They're 5x112, 15" diameter, 6" width.

Actually my *real* question is does anyone have any center caps they'd like to sell that would fit (or know where I could find some)? These rims came with my 4KQ but no caps came with them.

And since we're asking silly questions today here's another one: where can I find a radio adapter harness for this car that fits right?

When I look online, everyone seems to be selling a Metra 70-1784. But from the looks of it, it can only accept 2 plugs from the car's harness and my car has 3: one for power/lighting, one for the rear speakers, and one for the front.

Sorry no help to you Eric, but if you find out what those wheels came from, let me know. I like them.

looks like early urq or 5kq ronals. I think the stock 4kq hubs will fit if you like the flush cover; otherwise most just use the center black hex caps.

I have a set of 4 eric. Won't be back in boise till after christmas. Gimme a call to remind me and I'll send em your way.

Cool... will do!

Well I suppose this is a long shot but I'll toss it out anyway: does anyone in the area of northeast MA have a 4KQ or Urq center driveshaft that's usable and they'd like to get rid of?

The driveshaft that's in the car, with a center bearing that has ~6000 miles on it, has gone from making a barely-audible squealing noise at certain speeds and temperatures to sounding like an animal is being tortured under the car whenever it is moving. I have checked and am confident that there is not in fact an animal being tortured under the car. At this point, given the weather and such, I'd really like to just find another DS I can bolt in there and run for a few months rather than removing/rebuilding/reinstalling this one or my spare which also has a bad bearing and would need the CV joincs swapped over. :(

Has anyone got anything? Just to be clear: although the car is an 80, because I've swapped in an 016 tranny I need a 4KQ/Urq driveshaft and not a B3 driveshaft!

I've got one that i bought from force 5...i do think it needs work before being installed tho.

Hmm... depending on it's condition and the price, I might still be interested. Do you know what it needs done? How much do you want for it?

Well folks, I've confirmed it: my car is a victim of CCBS. What's CCBS? Crappy Center Bearing Syndrome!

About 3 years/10K miles ago I put a center driveshaft into my 4KTQ and replaced the center bearing with a fairly cheap BMW one. That was to replace the DS that came with the car, on which I'd also replaced the bearing and it was noisy from the minute I installed it.

Well guess what, the new bearing was noisy from the minute I installed it too. The noise wasn't really loud and only happened at certain times and basically I learned to ignore it.

Last summer, along with the engine + 016 transmission transplant, I installed that DS into my 80. The noise continued - no big surprise there.

Well about a month ago the noise started getting worse... and worse... to the point where it could no longer be ignored. A couple of days ago I pulled the DS and the bearing, with about 10K miles as I mention above, was definitely junk! Noisy and rough as hell when you spin it, had a little play, and when I pulled one of the seals off what's inside looked like a mix of 50% grease and 50% water.

The bearing is marked "Ina" - I always thought Ina bearings were decent, but maybe it's a Chinese knockoff or one of their cheaper series - I notice it's got rust on it so it's obviously not stainless for what that's worth.

Not that it probably has much value but here's a photo of the culprit:


So this time I decided not to cheap out and ordered one from Four Ring Performance which appears to actually be from Powertrain Industries. It's billed as being "OE quality" (just like every bearing ), looks pretty beefily made, and cost about 150 bucks. Hopefully that'll solve my problem! :frustrated:

$150?!?!

Eric...you never responded to my PM about my 4k driveshaft...

Hopefully it fixes your CCBS..... or maybe a little penicillin might help clear up that pesky infection....

my2000apb wrote:$150?!?!

Well I've already spent $60.00 on two cheap ones and the result is two useless driveshafts! And a lot of wasted time.

It doesn't look like they sell them for the old small bodies any more, but I think the ones Blauparts used to sell cost even more.

If the new one doesn't work out, I was actually able to press the this bearing out of the carrier - I can try replacing it with a non-crappy one. The range of prices on the bearing itself is amazing - I can get two on ebay for 7 bucks, or from McMaster I can get a wucka-wucka ABEC-7 one for a piddling $300.00!

audiPete wrote:Eric...you never responded to my PM about my 4k driveshaft...

You said you were going to send photos and never did!

But honestly, what I was really looking for was a DS I could just drop in and use. One that needs work done isn't really any better than what I already have. But I do appreciate the offer! :-)

Did you try the 034 bearing? A friend of mine has used that one for a few years now, and never had a problem.

No, because honestly their bearing looks like the BMW bearing that everyone else is selling for $20-$30, for example this: http://www.pelicanparts.com/cgi-bin/sma ... %2C%20Each

The power train industries one is the only one I've found that looks different, it seems to have much beefier construction. Not that the thickness of the metal frame necessarily matters that much, but it does look more like the OE one and hopefully for the additional price they'd supply a better bearing which IMHO is the important thing.

Here's a photo of the one I'm buying:

Interesting, I know he has somewhere in the range of 35k on his and it is still quiet. You have pm.

And I am now pleased to present (drum roll...) the new center bearing!

This thing is way more solid overall, and built much more like the OE item, than the bearing I was using before. The outer circular metal part is made of material that's got to be 4x as thick, and wider. Same goes for the bracket on the bottom.

The box had a sticker on it saying "Made in Taiwan" which is promising (or is Taiwan part of China this week?). The one thing that disappoints me a little is the lack of any indication of who manufactured the bearing itself. But as the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding... we'll see how it does once it's installed and has a few miles on it.

Edit: one thing I realized I didn't make very clear when I wrote this post is although I've only taken a few basic measurements is that this thing is clearly an attempt to duplicate the OE part and not just "something that might fit and work... maybe". It's design and dimensions appear to be exactly the same as the bearing that came on the 80 which as far as I can tell is OE.

So this just gets curiouser and curiouser!

Last night I set about installing the new bearing on the center driveshaft. Drove it onto the driveshaft, put the yoke on from the other half of the DS, and tightened the bolt to draw the yoke onto the splines. Then I removed the bolt to put some Loctite on it for final installation, and noticed that the yoke didn't seem to go quite as far onto the splines as it did before.

So I did some investigating, and actually ended up removing the bearing from my original 80 driveshaft (destructively) for comparison.

Here's the gist of what I found: as I think I wrote before, the bearing formerly on the driveshaft I'm working with (which is an urquattro or early 4KQ unit) was replaced by me about 3 years ago. It's the one most internet writeups say to use (an aftermarket replacement for a BMW 26-11-1-206-502). That bearing (I'm referring to the bearing itself now, not the whole support assembly) is 13 millimeters thick - it's a standard industry number 6006 bearing. But the bearing that was on the 80 DS (which as far as I can tell is original), and the new one I installed, is *15* millimeters thick!

So I'm not sure if the BMW bearing is just the wrong thing, or if there's an early-vs.-late difference or what, nor am I sure how much it even matters. For what it's worth, the area on the 80 DS where the bearing actually rests is about 14mm deep, so a 13mm thick bearing would be a little short, and a 15mm bearing would overhang a little.

On a separate note, the bearing in the OE 80 support was actually double-sealed - I'd never seen that before. You pull off the outer rubber seal and there's another one underneath it! The one on the (possibly Febi?) BMW bearing was not double-sealed, and had water in it. Hmmm...

I'm no help on the driveshaft, but just read through your cruise control setup - awesome idea! That will make bringing cruise control back to my car much easier! I was trying to think of how the linkage in the engine bay would work until you brought on an outside the box solution. Thanks!

Best of luck on the bearing too

Well I can't take too much credit for it - I just borrowed Saab's idea! This probably goes without saying but the trick is to make sure the chain can't catch on anything, 'cause if it did you'd have a stuck-open throttle.

Interesting on the width difference of the bearing. I wonder if that is what is causing the failure. I know to much end play in an electric motor will cause premature bearing failure. Any #s on the new bearing? Or possibly the original before you destroyed it?