Because
of the hesitation to entrust our Italian-American hybrids with the standard
auto shop grease monkey, many, if not most, Pantera owners are usually the
chief mechanic when service is needed for their Pantera. After my purchase of
2511 in November of 2002, I was no different than most owners and soon found
myself adding more metric sized wrenches and sockets to my tool chest,
accumulating a new coffee can filled with metric nuts and bolts and eventually
buying a stub axle nut socket.
Active
in Pantera Land, I soon became aware of these Service Kits and on occasion did
see them come up for sale on eBay, where I spend too much time buying and
selling. While owning my own Service Kit would no doubt be nice, and come in
handy now and then, the eBay auctions always moved up into the $400-$600
range, a purchase price I could not justify. I did venture to my local LM
dealer in search of their no doubt now derelict kit, only to find they had
cleared out many of their old kits, the Pantera Kit included, just a couple of
months earlier. But one day in August of 2009, I did my customary search of
new listings at eBay and there it was. I was looking at a complete Pantera
Service Kit, in the original plastic case, with an opening bid of only $25. It
took a few more seconds to actually register, but it was not a $25 opening
bid, it was a $25 Buy-It-Now auction. I promptly checked the shipping to see
if the seller had tried a sneaky trick sometimes used wherein the shipping
cost of an apparent bargain takes the final price back to reality pricing, but
not this time. So with a final click of the mouse, I bought my very own
Pantera Service Kit, to be shipped to my door, for the total price of $39.00.
What
I received was in fact a complete Service Kit, showing only minor wear on a
few of the tools. The case had lost the hinged plastic latches, and the inner
blow mold lining had been heavily damaged in shipping as the kit weighs about
fifty pounds. Now the fun of figuring out how to use all these tools began.
One
of my old Hall Pantera catalogs listed the same tools for sale, which helped
identify which tools went with each service task. But the Pantera Technical
Information publication, service manual if you will, is very vague in just how
the various tools are to be used. As an example, the suspension bushing tool
group has five pieces, and they all have the same part number. In the
manual’s front suspension section, the description of how to remove the
A-arm bushings reads:
Using
Tool T72D-3044 press out the bushings from the inside of the A-frame.
No
steps, no directions, and amazingly no photos or diagrams, either.
The
same lack of specific steps is also found in the section on pressing the stub
axle from the rear upright, where again all five pieces of that tool group
have the same part number. That section does however at least have a few
helpful pictures.
So
while I do have a very rare, and potentially helpful, set of factory tools,
the specifics of how to use most of them will just have to be deciphered when
the need arises.
The kit case and view of the tools in the case. Click here to view the packing slip for the kit
Instruction sheet included in the kit.
Hall Pantera tool kit catalog
Bearing Cup and Seal Replacer. Part number T72D-1217.
Axel Bearing Tool. Part number T72D-1225. Note the Owatonna Tools, Inc. logo in the image above.
Rear Spindle Inboard Lock Nut Wrench. Part number T72D-4851.
Ball Joint Tool. Part number T72D-3006
Coil Spring Compressor. Part number T72D-5310.
Ball Joint Press. Part number T72D-3006.
Suspension Bushing Tool. Part number T72D-3044.