@suprarx7nut I chuckled to myself on that one... I've paid my dues with knuckle rebuilds on 80's and all sorts of other things but I'd still rate my monkey skills at 3.5 .
Hope to get some pictures of the diff opened early in the week to have some definitive answers.
After mulling over this a bit I'm mostly kicking myself for intentionally deciding NOT to buy a winch for the first time because "I don't wheel like that anymore".
To be clear, I don't mean my comment as any kind of knock on your skills. I think somebody can be an excellent mechanic and still get a diff rebuild wrong on their first try. It's a unique animal with success and failure separated by some pretty nuanced differences.
I’m not a professional mechanic but I am a professional mechanical engineer with nearly 20 years of experience and it took me two crush sleeves to set pinion depth and then probably 7-8 combos of side bearing spacers to get in spec. That was after reading every write up on Zuk’s site ten times over. It’s tedious, but not difficult.
Yup. I saw a comment from somebody that called it part science and part artform recently. I think that's a good way to put it.
Point being, @Blue Phoenix , if you do it yourself, plan on a lot of prep and maybe a second attempt. If you pay someone else, make sure the mechanic is experienced with diff rebuilds specifically. I've always had a locking diff install pinned as a ~$2-3k job in my mind (assuming it's installed before you kill a ring gear.
Your experience is a pretty good example of why I don't give anyone crap for installing "too much" recovery/wheeling gear. The recovery gear and armor/upgrades are all totally unnecessary until they aren't and you just never know when that's going to be if you're driving remote off road. Most of them pay for themselves with one single use so build her up!