Tuesday 16 April 2013

Annual service of the Argo

The weather is slowing starting to warm up so I thought I'd get the Argocat out and give it a good service. It was due to have its chains greased, the air filter precleaner washed and the outer bearings greased.  It had 3 slow punctures, two were rim seal leaks and the other seemed to be from a nail hole and these needed fixing.

I also wanted to change the coolant as it was looking rather dirty. I only realy noticed this at the end of last year when I used an anitfreeze tester to check that it would be OK over the winter. It is not unusual to get temperatures of  -17C here in Speyside. Anyway the glycol level was fine but it was a rather muddy colour and probably hadn't been changed for a long time.   


So, as is now my usual practice, I got it in the garage and jacked up both ends, put it in neutral so that the wheels would turn freely, stripped out the plastic floor liners and sprayed the chains, revolving them round as I turned one of the wheels. This is quite an easy job once you have the whole thing jacked up off the ground. I then took off the wheels and greased the outer bearings, two grease nipples per wheel. I quite enjoy the greasing but not undoing and replacing the 40 wheel nuts ... 5 per wheel. I took the three wheels with air leaks to the local garage after having tried to break the beads myself . You need the right tools and they probably hadn't been off for 15 years I just couldn't get them to budge.



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