Quote:
Originally Posted by EliotW
I've never taken a differential apart before. Swapped one and changed the oil but disassembling never. From your photos they don't look too complex mechanically... what sort of skill and time did the conversion require? Were you just transferring the gearing from the ASD diff into your 185 diff?
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Differential work is NOT simple, despite the fact that the mechanicals appear that way. The basic reason is that everything has insanely close tolerances, and a number of $pecial tool$ are needed to do any serious diff work. You don't want to mess with gearing if possible. You want to get the housing that fits your car, with the gearset you need already installed. Then swap the input & output flanges and rear cover (as necessary), and pop that into your car. That's what I did, which was not terribly hard.
The hard part was rebuilding the LSD itself, as the factory manual is pretty cryptic and leaves out a lot that I had to learn the hard way. With a diff out of the car, I could probably do it again in under 10 hours, if I had all the parts.
If you swap ring gear carriers, you need to adjust the gear backlash afterwards (special tools required) - but any decent rear end shop should be able to do this for you. Swapping gearsets is a whole 'nuther story - I would avoid this like the plague. You don't want to touch the pinion at
all. Even messing with the input flange (which I had to do) is skating on thin ice - if the torque isn't set properly (special N-cm rotational friction gauge required), the diff can fail. I got lucky and it worked OK, but I was sweating bullets until I got it in the car and it actually worked. I was able to borrow the tool, but I was still nervous, because the nut didn't go back to the original position like other people said it should. (!!)
I still need to post a write-up on the whole project - haven't had time, d'oh.
