Next up is the rear gearbox and shock tower. The first part is to assemble the rear centre drive shaft, this showed the bearings behind the diff pinion to be huge at 19mm and 11mm O.D. The CVD drive pin is aslo captured by the inner bearing and the joint is sealed off with a rubber boot.
The centre shaft is then fed through the gearobx and prevented from moving by three self tapping screws.
I think this picture also shows the size of the bearing just behind the diff pinion. I guess that Serpent had some issues with previous versions of the Cobra 811 buggies in this area and hence the possible overkill.
There is a seperate sheet with the manual which suggests to use additional shims when building the centre drive shafts and also for the diffs, but these are only a starting recommendation and you might find that a different shim set up is required when building the gearboxes. This sheet (and the manual) can be downloaded from the Serpent website.
I found that the rear gearbox went together very well with the updated shim set up.
The two gearbox halves sandwich the rear shock tower, and all went together very well. The only issue I have here is that plastic nuts and countersunk washers are used to bolt the two cases togehter, apparently this is done so that in the event of a crash the nuts will break and not the gearobx cases or shock tower. I built the gearbox with these nuts and washers, but will probably change them out for proper M3 nyloc nuts and ali countersunk washers later on for more peace of mind.
