After driving the oil seals into the axle housing, I focused my attention back to the centre. This is where the pumpkin goes back into the housing 🙂
While inspecting the region, I soon realised I forgot to replace the factory mounting bolts before putting the housing back onto the chassis…
Though most were fine, some of them had a few stretched threads – and since this region leaked constantly in the past, I was more than prepared to fit some new bolts in… A few variations were available but the manifold studs below were the only variation that were plated to my liking (though slightly beefier in the middle).
After wire-wheeling the mounting surfaces to the best of my ability, the studs were installed with some blue Loctite:
Following that, a new gasket:
New gasket in:
After this, I cleaned the garage, took a good break and mentally prepared myself for what was coming… put the diff in safely by hand. Because I don’t have any good lifting tools for this scenario, this was going to be a challenging task. Eventually I ended up with a huge thick slab of wood, several towels and some tired abs…
And finally… I managed to fit the diff in by hand. I wanted to try the self-locking nut + washer combination this time round to mount the diff – and see if there’s any difference compared to the traditional setup (spring washer and nut):
IAD 