So once again, let's fast forward further as it was once again busy for a while, and at the end of August, I started noticing a few small drips of oil on the floor of my garage. And of coarse, i am always glancing/looking/keeping an eye out for something that may not be right...just the car guy in me I know, and I knew this drip definitely wasn't there before and couldn't have come from anything outside. So I climb under the rear of my Jeep, and sure enough, the rear diff is leaking from the cover...only 3000 miles after it was put on, and not even any wheelin' in that time! Just normal on-road daily driving...:thinking: So i kept an eye on it, to make sure it was coming from where I thought it was and sure enough, it started getting worse, slightly, but more than before, and obviously, it shouldn't be doing that in the first place.
A couple of week ago then, beginning of September, I got all the stuff together I needed to take the cover off and clean up everything in the diff, and then put it all back together with hopefully no leak. I when over the one of my buddies garages from my Jeep Club to get some help in case something more was wrong than just simply cover off, reseal, back on, and man was I very glad I did! What should have been a simple 30 minute task ended up being a 3 1/2 hour project. I had a shop install these, so i assumed they were all good, but definitely need to make a few calls at this point and talk to some people, because what I found was extremely bad!
We went to take the cover off, and before we even loosened our first bolt, be found that the bolt at the very top of the diff already broken! We put a wrench on to start to loosen the bolt, and the head just fell right off of the bolt...there was one of the potential bigger leaks! The bolt actually broke off further in threads, and the remaining couple of threads that came out with the bolt didn't look like it was the same bolt, but when compared, the threads were actually stretched! We the proceeded to work our way around the rest of the diff to loosen bolts, and we found 3 more bolts that were only hand tightened! Starting to see why the diff was leaking now for sure!
We finally moved on to popping the diff cover off, and this was another 30-45 minutes, because the RTV seal on the cover was so thin, we could not get anything in between the diff cover and the housing. After all that time, we were finally able to hammer a razor blade in far enough to break the cover loose! And when we did, there was a 1/4" bead of RTV on the inside of the housing/cover mating surface (the bead was 1/4" thick that was pilled into the housing actually, not on the cover matting surface. We also found most of the bolt holes full of RTV. But there was basically nothing on the matting surface where it was actually needed. So a lot of cleaning up of parts, and on top of that cleaning up a mess someone else had made now!
We then went to reinstall the diff cover, and started replacing bolts, using only hands and small hand tools, because there is no need to over torque anything here! We get all of the bolts hand tight, then to about 11-13 ft/lbs, and then we were going around for the final torque to 22 ft/lbs and...another bolt nearly breaks, but was stopped just short. We backed it out very gently/carefully and this is what it looked like:
The bolt completely stretched out at ~18-20 ft/lbs. Not sure exactly what happened here, if the shop who installed over torqued and had already weekend the bolt, or manufacturer defect? Not sure. My friend who was helping me took some of the bolts and torque tested them, and they were ok up to about 40 ft/lbs for sure, so no reason they should have broke in the rear diff, what we decided that that was it, we did not trust those bolts, and we went and grabbed some Grade 8 hardware from Lowes to reinstall. We also grabbed enough to redo all the bolts in the front diff, as it is the same cover, with same hardware, and installed at the same shop, so we replaced one bolt at a time and got that one all secured back up too! We made sure the rear diff was still clean, grabbed a LubeLocker for the rear diff, and got the cover installed back up with no more issues! And 300-400 miles later and a solid off roading trip with hitting that rear cover a couple of times, and the diff seams to be holding strong! So hopefully that fixed it, but will keep you updated on what the parties who I discuss this with will say!
