ihatemybike
Explorer
Wish we had Ladas in the states. Look like fun little cars.
Lada Niva Mini Expedition Project
- Thread starter griffdog
- Start date
Pretty big day in the office today...
I had the day of work so decided that I would change my diff housing as its bent using the one from the white 1.7. This was more and stuffing around than I would have liked given that I needed to use the actual diff from my car and transfer it into the new housing to keep my 4.1 diff ratios. Getting the housing of the white car was a bit of a pain, with the usual rusty bolts dirt and spiders, but things got even more tricky when I went to do the swap.
My plan was to pull the axles and free the 4.1 diff on the car, and then transfer the complete 1.7 assembly over. Once on the car, I would pull the axles and remove the diff before hooking the 4.1 diff up. I would then have a good diff housing, my 4.1 diffs and self adjusting brakes. Easy hey...
Anyway, after releasing one axle on my car, it would not budge. Using a wheel as a slid hammer against loose studs, did nothing, even in tandem with an assistant trying to give it a whack from behind. I conceeded defeat and just removed the whole assembly. The extent of my "bend" became apparant then. The housing is bent up and back. Looks like someone may have tried to recover it by trying a chain or the like to the diff housing - cheers for that mate.
The funny thing is that it was actually driving OK save for so big vibes one you got up to speed. It was turning in pretty quick on corners. Guess thats what a bit of -ve camber and toe in will do for you!! I have a feeling that the axel itself is not bent as such but is acting as a spring. The wheel bearing feel OK and there was no metal in the oil. Thats pretty good going cause I reckon that she is at least an inch and a half out of whack. Couple of pictures. First shows how much negative camber, second shows the bent housing.
I now have the new diff fitted with its 3.9 ratio. I think I am going to have to just angle grind through the housing to get that axle out. The other should remove OK and then I will swap the diffs. Oh yeah - need a couple of brake pipes and a new handbrake cable.
I changed the exhause while I had the rear end out and a few other jobs, but all up 9 hours straight and I am still on the go.
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I had the day of work so decided that I would change my diff housing as its bent using the one from the white 1.7. This was more and stuffing around than I would have liked given that I needed to use the actual diff from my car and transfer it into the new housing to keep my 4.1 diff ratios. Getting the housing of the white car was a bit of a pain, with the usual rusty bolts dirt and spiders, but things got even more tricky when I went to do the swap.
My plan was to pull the axles and free the 4.1 diff on the car, and then transfer the complete 1.7 assembly over. Once on the car, I would pull the axles and remove the diff before hooking the 4.1 diff up. I would then have a good diff housing, my 4.1 diffs and self adjusting brakes. Easy hey...
Anyway, after releasing one axle on my car, it would not budge. Using a wheel as a slid hammer against loose studs, did nothing, even in tandem with an assistant trying to give it a whack from behind. I conceeded defeat and just removed the whole assembly. The extent of my "bend" became apparant then. The housing is bent up and back. Looks like someone may have tried to recover it by trying a chain or the like to the diff housing - cheers for that mate.
The funny thing is that it was actually driving OK save for so big vibes one you got up to speed. It was turning in pretty quick on corners. Guess thats what a bit of -ve camber and toe in will do for you!! I have a feeling that the axel itself is not bent as such but is acting as a spring. The wheel bearing feel OK and there was no metal in the oil. Thats pretty good going cause I reckon that she is at least an inch and a half out of whack. Couple of pictures. First shows how much negative camber, second shows the bent housing.
I now have the new diff fitted with its 3.9 ratio. I think I am going to have to just angle grind through the housing to get that axle out. The other should remove OK and then I will swap the diffs. Oh yeah - need a couple of brake pipes and a new handbrake cable.
I changed the exhause while I had the rear end out and a few other jobs, but all up 9 hours straight and I am still on the go.
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Back end is all back together and working well. Time today for a bit of an adventure with the family. 4 hours driving and almost all on either sandy tracks, dunes or across fields. My 5 year old son is into light houses so we went to find the only one on the island that he has not seen. Its un pretty crappy lighthouse as they go, but worth the drive out to a point on private land that is not visited by anyone except the Kelp harvesters (bull kelp washes up on the shore and is collected and sold for 400 aus dollars a tonne, King Island has the best kelp in the world).
Lada was sensational - eats the sand and dunes for breakfast.
Some pictures.
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Lada was sensational - eats the sand and dunes for breakfast.
Some pictures.
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Today I did the back up duties for one of our hiking groups, which meant 200km of driving the Niva to campsites picking up empty water drums and dropping new ones out. At one point I needed to do a reccee of a river crossing that required me to drive 30 km up the beach. This was pretty much virgin beach that would not have seen a car before. A bit hairy getting onto the beach with a pretty steep drop off to get down of the dunes, and always the risk that you get bogged in the middle of nowhere by yourself, but pretty spectacular driving 100kph down the beach in the pouring rain. I made a little video!!! It does not look like much but I was about 40km away from getting any help if I got stuck, and getting back off the beach required me to hit the drop off at full noise in low 2nd and a pretty launched front end, that would have been a better video, but what can you do when you are out there on your own?
http://youtu.be/Cz5VVe50avY
And a nice pic. Its a pretty wild day here today.
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http://youtu.be/Cz5VVe50avY
And a nice pic. Its a pretty wild day here today.
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sandalscout
Adventurer
So true, love this car and what you are doing with it!
One thing I can tell you is that it is great being able to work on the thing with only the most basic tool kit. You can just about pull the whole car apart with 17mm, 13mm, 10mm spanners and a phillips head screwdriver. The standard tool kit that I posted earlier has all of these and I have just added a few useful things and I feel pretty confident I can fix most things in the field. Just about everything on the car is mechanical and straightforward to fix.
Had another adventure on the weekend, where we found a track heading down to a really isolated beach. Anything bigger than a niva would not have made it down the track, but it was very sandy so you needed a good 4wd.
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Niva's often get flak for not being big enough and hence not being able to carry much gear.
This is my niva with the following behind the back seats in preperation for shipping it off the island :
- Spare gearbox
- Spare transfer case
- Spare steering box and idler arm
- Spare starter motor
- 4lt engine oil, 4 lt diff oil, 4lt auto trans fluid, 2 oil filters and a transmission filter
- 4 lt paint
- Various bolts, brackets and bits and pieces off my parts car.
- Hiking boots, torches and odds and ends
- All tools used for dismantling parts car.
- 1 cycling track pump
- A staionary trainer for bike
- A classic colnago road bike (dismantled)
Try that on for size landcuiser man!!
Theres actually still a fair bit of room left which I will pack full of stuff, and I havent even started with inside the car.
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This is my niva with the following behind the back seats in preperation for shipping it off the island :
- Spare gearbox
- Spare transfer case
- Spare steering box and idler arm
- Spare starter motor
- 4lt engine oil, 4 lt diff oil, 4lt auto trans fluid, 2 oil filters and a transmission filter
- 4 lt paint
- Various bolts, brackets and bits and pieces off my parts car.
- Hiking boots, torches and odds and ends
- All tools used for dismantling parts car.
- 1 cycling track pump
- A staionary trainer for bike
- A classic colnago road bike (dismantled)
Try that on for size landcuiser man!!
Theres actually still a fair bit of room left which I will pack full of stuff, and I havent even started with inside the car.
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Im Back
Long time no update with the Niva. Thats because I sold it. Why? Because I could see that starting with a more sound base, in particualr a 1.7 injected model - GM mono point injection with electronic ignition, made more sense.
Low and behold my search of the country over the last 12 months ended with me going to see a car less than a mile from my house.
So now I am the proud owner of a 97 niva in a cool colour with 106 thousand KM on the clock. Owned by a young girl who did the right things by the car but local mechanics did not know the tricks you need with the lada and so did not tighten the cam chain (manual adjustment) so it flapped around until it yanked the tensioner off, made a racket and she parked it 4 years ago in the shed - till I picked it up today.
This thread is now back on....
Beast is home, and hour of elbow grease and we have this!!!
Long time no update with the Niva. Thats because I sold it. Why? Because I could see that starting with a more sound base, in particualr a 1.7 injected model - GM mono point injection with electronic ignition, made more sense.
Low and behold my search of the country over the last 12 months ended with me going to see a car less than a mile from my house.
So now I am the proud owner of a 97 niva in a cool colour with 106 thousand KM on the clock. Owned by a young girl who did the right things by the car but local mechanics did not know the tricks you need with the lada and so did not tighten the cam chain (manual adjustment) so it flapped around until it yanked the tensioner off, made a racket and she parked it 4 years ago in the shed - till I picked it up today.
This thread is now back on....
Beast is home, and hour of elbow grease and we have this!!!
ihatemybike
Explorer
This gives me a bad case of want.
Gren_T
Adventurer
That's a nice looking car, I bought a niva at auction dirt cheap due to a very noisy engine, 5mins with 17 & 13mm spanners and it was sorted:victory:
though did have to replace the tension shoe a few weeks later.
hows the plans for the simpson coming on?
I've said it before .. great location you have.
regards
Gren
though did have to replace the tension shoe a few weeks later.
hows the plans for the simpson coming on?
I've said it before .. great location you have.
regards
Gren
I am going to replace the chain and tensioner and pads as a matter of course. It had dropped its pads which happens when the cam chain gets enough slack that it starts flapping around. The parts are cheap and worth replacing as a job lot.
Plan is to have another crack at the simpson mid year. I feel very confident that this car will be ideal for this and that it is a long term keeper for me. The first one started as just something to fiddle with in my spare time and my appreciation for it grew with more experience and knowledge of how it worked. It had a few little issues that meant that I was chasing little bodges that other people had made. This car is rock stock original and will about 500 dollars worth of parts from the Ukraine will be good for 10 years of exploring.
The mate that came to pick it up with me has a one year old Toyota Prado - he just spent 3k on doing the suspension. This is on top of what is a 60k car in australia that he purchsed with 5k worth of options - we are talking 70k all up with a set of decnt tyres. Contrast that with this:
Lada purchased for 500
All new bushes, rubber boots, cam chain, tensioner, indicators lenses and gearbox bearings - about 500
Decent tyres - 500
4.3 to one diff gears front and rear 400
= about 2k
Spend another 2k and you are looking at double torsen diffs and 3:1 reduction transfer and you are unstoppable and driving something that in its stedfast refusal to try and be cool has actually found itself being cooler than almost everything else out there.
Plan is to have another crack at the simpson mid year. I feel very confident that this car will be ideal for this and that it is a long term keeper for me. The first one started as just something to fiddle with in my spare time and my appreciation for it grew with more experience and knowledge of how it worked. It had a few little issues that meant that I was chasing little bodges that other people had made. This car is rock stock original and will about 500 dollars worth of parts from the Ukraine will be good for 10 years of exploring.
The mate that came to pick it up with me has a one year old Toyota Prado - he just spent 3k on doing the suspension. This is on top of what is a 60k car in australia that he purchsed with 5k worth of options - we are talking 70k all up with a set of decnt tyres. Contrast that with this:
Lada purchased for 500
All new bushes, rubber boots, cam chain, tensioner, indicators lenses and gearbox bearings - about 500
Decent tyres - 500
4.3 to one diff gears front and rear 400
= about 2k
Spend another 2k and you are looking at double torsen diffs and 3:1 reduction transfer and you are unstoppable and driving something that in its stedfast refusal to try and be cool has actually found itself being cooler than almost everything else out there.
ttravis5446
Adventurer
The new car is really nice looking. I really like the idea of these lad as but I've never seen one in person.