Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing How often to grease upper nipples?

I have only scanned all these posts so this may have been covered. I appreciate the original posters car is much younger than mine (a 1997 Plus 8) so this may not apply. I read in Go Mog an article explaining why greasing the top nipple is a waste of time; so personally, I don't.

https://www.gomog.com/allmorgan/remotegreasing.html

As for the lower grease nipples, I follow the advice of Techniques which is to leave the car on the ground and jack up below the end of the damper blade to take off the pressure to help the grease flow. Again a 1997 car so newer ones might be OK without doing this.

Lot of good stuff on GoMog but also some absolute howlers. The problem is if the webmaster didn’t agree he posted his version then claimed he had seen ‘many hundreds of examples’, if disagreements continued he logged in with a different user name (he had many) and congratulated himself on his wisdom!

Even when he was sent photos proving that the upper and lower grease nipples supply grease to the exact same grease void in the stub axle he refused to accept it.

It makes no difference, grease either and observe where the excess grease exits. The top nipple goes via a central king pin drilling then out to an annular groove (easily seen on king pin photos) and when assembled this groove sits between the stub axle bushes, that’s where the stub axle (lower) grease nipple is drilled to.

This has been demonstrated to several owners on the bench during king pin jobs.

BR
Colin

Does this apply to the earlier models? I've removed the 'oiler' and replaced it with a grease nipple to keep muck and dust out, but never bothered actually sticking grease in - mainly due to advice on GoMog.

The earlier oiler type kingpins had a very small hole drilled down through it and I think you would really struggle to get grease through, whenever I’ve worked on front ends because the cost of parts is so reasonable I’ve always replaced King pins and bushes every strip down because 3/4 of the cost is labour even when doing my own car.

I always used hard chrome kingpins and spiral grooved phosphor bronze bushes from Peter M at Mulfab but since Pete’s retirement would shop via Cain at Wolf Performance.

Agreed about Go Mog. I think that was my point is that mine is an earlier car and as you say difficult to squee,e grease down from the top nipple. Might not apply to later cars.

Coming from a background of lubrication being everything in motoring/motorcycling, I have always had a tendency to over-grease leading to surplus grease making it's way to one or other brake disc manifesting itself in puling to one side under braking. Not a good state of affairs. I'm having to learn the art of careful neglect and it's not easy. I've been greasing every 500 miles which is obviously far too often. I'm now going to be moving to every 1000 miles. Someone I used to work with never greased his kingpins; didn't even know you were supposed to; and never had a problem!

Good advice as always, Colin.

Has anyone ever heard of a set of hard chrome kingpins needing to be replaced through wear?

Hi Tim

No, I have seen one car that had done an enormous mileage (can’t be accurate but way over 70K) the owner asked me to replace his pins as he had an MOT advisory. When it was all stripped there was no noticeable wear visible, out with the micrometer and nothing and compared to new stock they were within a thou or two (might have been from a different supplier when he had them fitted).

The lower bush was worn though and that’s where the play was so even though his pins were fine he elected to have everything replaced for the reason mentioned earlier. So it seems if greased (he admitted to not being as diligent as he should have been) they have a very long life.

Contrast that to a similar mileage owner (on this forum) who had wanted to see the life of his OE Stainless pins that were very heavily worn but we discovered when jacked and wheels in full droop it was impossible to detect wear as it was all in the pins and the stubs were dropped to a different unworn place! Very concerning. He took the pins home as trophy’s :-).

BR
Colin

So for King Pins grease choice is top (if you have spiralled bronze bushes) or bottom but you don’t need to do both as the grease goes in the same place?

Will

Correct. But you need to know if the top one is there replacing an oiler on the old factory pins as the groove is too small to efficiently grease via them.