New beam: done!

Yesterday afternoon I started to prepare the donor beam. The tabs to attach the front bumper had to be welded on and more important, I literally flooded the whole inside of both domes with cavity wax. This beam should last forever!
As the manuals say, re-assembly in reverse order, which was a doodle with exception of inserting the leaf springs (a highlight, every time again) and I also struggled to re-install the speedometer cable! Somehow the rubber plug in the spindle didn't allow to feed the cable deep enough, then it didn't move at all. A lot of pulling and swearing resulted in this:

 

The first ~15 cm outer "skin" ripped off! Using it in this condition would result in almost instant death of the cable. Well, I always have a lot of spares in my garage, but a speedo cable isn't something you expect to need now and then. So I had to fix it. Luckily I have several rolls of heat shring tubing material in different diameters available, why not give it a try with this. It should seal in both directions, no water can ingress and no grease can egress.

Here is the cure for the cable:

In the background you can see the remains of the rubber plug. This is something I had in my spare parts stash:

The rest was done real quick, the beam got another coat of wax from the outside, then I just checked if all screws were properly fixed, the grease nipples were used to press out any old grease and a final visual check if everything looked good.

This is the result of all the work - nothing looks different than before, but now all is safe and rust free again!
On the bright side, none of the involved tools will catch any rust soon, as this was a messy, greasy affair!