Mike,
If I had a spare set of knuckles, I could do a dry fit but am not ready for a road test. The dry test does generate some questions to ponder here:
1. Is dry fitting good enough? Shouldn't the test fitter take the car out for a drive afterwards? Think of this as a combination of "Static & Short-Term Dynamic" test.
2. Are there some sort of measurements or pictures that need to be taken. One thing I can think of is "What if the floating bearing depth on the inner CV joint is not quite right?" Should the dry fit involve getting axles with no inner boots and grease on them so that pictures can be taken of where bearing sits when the tires are fully unloaded vs. car resting on the ground? Same thing goes for hard left and hard right steering positions. We might be able to catch an issue of the bearing wanting to pop out of the joint or bottoming in the socket or some other anomaly which might lead to short bearing life. This test would eliminate the ability of doing the Test Drive previously suggested but still might be useful.
3. Whoever does the test fitting, what happens when the test fitting is done? If those new hubs have to be pressed back out, somebody has to be willing to eat a set of wheel bearings since these bearings usually don't survive the removal process.
As it turns out Frank has already built this kit and someone perhaps on CEG is running it. He built the kit quite a while ago and actually the person contacted him recently because he messed up a hub and needed a replacement. So the only difference between the kit he built before and our is the newer, stronger material, for the inner CV end going into the trans/intermediate shaft. Also the CV shaft lengths were already reverse engineered from a set of CV shafts that they tore down when they first started making axle kits for the Contours with their stage 1 and stage 2 kits.