Finally got around to fitting the De-Dion, the hubs, calipers and of course shocks.
The advice here would be to build it all on the bench first. The brake pipe in particular took some bending around a large diameter socket to be anywhere near where it would fit the hubs. A slowly and gently approach worked well.
It started with me laying out all the bolts having measured them using my new digital measury thing. Awesome and worth every penny – in fact about 599 pennies on Ebay!
Then I set about bolting the shock to the car and then the de-dion. The result of which you can see below. I am now operating on the basis that no bolts will fit unless I make them. My friends at Amazon Prime delivered a UNF tap and die set the following day. It is no coincidence that Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man!
After a good 15 minutes of carefully cleaning out the thread on the de-dion the new bolt from Derek went in with no issues.