rear end removal & rebuild

[Hoodlum Rocky]

well i dropped the rear out of my 58, one of the guys in my club is a great machinist and fab guy. so we are going to try to take this commercial rear and change the housing around to have rear disc brakes. The car has low twenty thousand miles on it so i hope when we open up the carrier we wont have to do to much to it on bearings ect.

while everything is out im going to clean up and prime the back half of the frame and reundercoat the floor.DSCN0673.jpgDSCN0669.jpgDSCN0668.jpgDSCN0684.jpgDSCN0690.jpg

[ironpony]

just thinking out loud, might it be more cost effective to find a disc brake rear end out of a p/u truck??? alot of them run disc brakes and you can save the original??
not sure if the original is worth money / rare or not

[bluke1]

Beautiful car. And ironpony may be on to something. Might be able to find a rear axle that is easy to fit in, especially if you need a different gear ratio for cruising. Food for thought....

[Creepy Cruiser]

That's what I did. I found one that was narrower as well as disk brake, because I wanted to tuck 10" wide wheels all the way around on mine. Also, same bolt pattern, and real nice highway gears, all in one nice package.

[Hoodlum Rocky]

that was my initial thought was to use a mid to late 90's truck rear, that way i had the same 5-5 bolt pattern. but i found that the truck rear was 10" shorter then the rear that was in the car so that was thrown out the window. The plan b was to have currie build me a rear, and i was going to go that route and that was like 3800 to have them do that. and the guy that is in my car club build rears and stuff, and he said lets do up my old rear tear it apart and look it over replace and fix what is needed and switch it over to disc. should be alot less. And this car only has 23.000 miles on it so that rear should not be too worn. that is the plan for now, but that is not why i did not use a later model truck rear. i did not want to play with that much wheel offset on it.

[Creepy Cruiser]

Yep, if you're not wanting to change your offset, then just building disk brake brackets is definitely the way to go. They are very simple. Also, don't go to big in the rear (or at least add an inline adjustable proportioning valve) so you don't get to much rear bias. You'll also need to change out your master for one designed for rear disk, (again very cheap and easy). Unless you already did that when you did the front conversion.

[Hoodlum Rocky]

yes im going to switch the master and booster set up. This car makes it alittle more difficult because it runs under the heat box and up the fire wall. kind of a goofy dumb set up. So i plan to pull all the old heater set up stuff off and switch it to a newer style. and then i can put in a hanging pedal assembly, and a modern power brake booster.

[Creepy Cruiser]

Yep, I totally understand. I eliminated all the heater stuff on my firewall when I shaved it. Now, I'm going to install a whole unit from an early Datsun truck (because it's so compact and complete with blower motor) under the dash instead. I'm lucky though, I didn't have to do as much as you, to update my master for the 4 wheel disk.

You can see more pics of me shaving it in my gallery. http://www.nationalhearse.net/forums...hp?albumid=205