At the Shropshire Suzuki Club's first summer camp, I got up in the morning, had a bacon, sausage and egg sandwich, a few cups of tea, and then went to start offroading with everyone else... errr, only I had no drive to the front axle?! The front prop was spinning, and so were the back wheels! As there was no four wheel drive I wasn't getting anywhere, and was forced to retire back to the campsite and sulk all day! LOL

So today I thought I'd better strip the axle out and see what was going on...

In this photo (forget to take any initially, so you join us mid-job!) I've already taken the steel (blue) axle casing apart and ascertained what's wrong...

Hmmm, there's a fair few bits of teeth in the diff pan! :(

And one of the sun gears (passenger side on the long half-shaft side) has been well an truly trashed! You can see the other side gear for comparison in the above photo!

But these have been gnawed away! Oh dear...

So, back to the story-strip ;)

Luckily I had a spare diff in the garage, and even luckier it was a 26 spline diff...!

I got it from a fellow club member (Thanks, Neil666!) to replace the long half-shaft in my hybrid axle, as it was built from a turbo diesel Vitara's steel diff casing, with a Vitara standard 5.125:1 Ring and Pinnion, and it was converted to 26 spline shafts by using the sun gears out of a Vitara rear diff...

Anyway, so the 26 spline diff I had in the garage, off a later Vitara, sadly had the wrong ratio! It had 38 teeth on the crown wheel and 8 on the pinnion, so 38/8 = 4.75 ; where as my standard gearing needs a 41/8 = 5.125 ratio... Hmmm, so I decided to use just the centre carrier from the diff in the garage, to transplant into my existing axle...

So in the above photo you see me stripping the spare diff for the carrier in the middle...

And here it is out of the diff, with the "wrong" crown wheel on it... so after a bit of effort, it's off...

There it is in the right of the photo, with the steel third member and the bearing retainers from the steel diff... I took them out very carefully, keeping them in tact, hoping they'd locate back in and give me the right backlash when the diff was rebuilt...?!

Cleaned the pan out, all oil and teeth removed!

Now, there's the 5.125 ratio (41 teeth) crown wheel awaiting reassembly to the diff carrier...

In the vice, and some loctite retaining compound waits to "glue" the bolts in! ;)

Bolts in, next to tighten them down...

Back to these shafts then, this is why I had the spare diff in the garage in the first place, here's the interesting bit... the top one is a Grand Vitara 26 spline shaft we originally used to build into the steel diff casing... only it didn't fit too well, it seemed about a quarter on an inch too long? Whether that caused the damage to the sun gears is questionable, as the splines slide right through the sun gear, so I can't see how it would have damaged the gears? Didn't help though...! So the bottom half shaft is from a late Vitara, it's 26 spline but about a quarter of an inch shorter?! Why can't they all just have interchangeable parts?! ;) LOL

See, a quarter of an inch difference?

So, here's the diff rebuilt into the steel third member and awaiting reassembly... before I did though I texted Richie to see if he could sneak out of work and pop round and have a feel of the backlash, I was convinced it "felt" right, but a second opinion always helps (share the blame!). Having both had a waggle and agreed it felt right (Thanks Rich!!), I set about rebuilding it back in... I went out and got some cheap silicon to make the seal better and bolted it all back together...

Steel Axle with Granvil conversion awaiting refitting... a bitch of a job, it's a bit of a struggle holding it up and bolting it in... on the floor, on your back, on your own... LOL

Talking about the Granvil conversion... before putting it all back together, I took the diff hanger out and drilled it for the countersunk bolt I was going to have made - couldn't find/order on anywhere, so I was going to get a few turned up by my CNC suppliers... But after drilling it and seeing how thick the bracket was, I decided to cut it down by 3mm...

See, it's still 6mm think at that point, which is more than strong enough, and...

... gives a bit more clearance between that diff mounting bolt and the drive flange... I've used counter sunk bolts on that side, because it's normal M10 bolts in use (i.e. not metric fine thread which the axle casing is)

With the axle back in place, after a bit of a fight!, the last thing to do is get a bit more oil into it - this is because the axle is hung on 1" drop brackets to alleviate the strain on the front driveshafts... so the axle is running tilted forward, so the oil filler hole is also angles down, so you can't get enough oil in it (unless you park it up a steep slope!) to compensate for this, and the fact that the oil runs forward into the pan, and doesn't remain up by the pinnion bearing... so I like to get a bit extra oil into it...

Enter the "bunny bottle", it's my two daughters Rabbit's drinking bottle with the end cut off so that there's no ball bearing in the bottom (where the rabbit licks to get water) and the top (bottom?) of the bottle has been cut off too... a rubber hose is clamped onto the top of the axle breather and then you just wait for the oil to trickle down with gravity...

Or do you? I was waiting for ages to let gravity take it's course, but was running out of time... and then a flash of inspiration hit me, and I went next door to our shop and got a packet of balloons... stuck one in the top of the cut off bottle and blew it up! LOL

And that forces the oil down...

Next job, rebuild the free wheel hubs...