Had a big day today. After about 6 weeks of the beast being stranded in the driveway, I finally got her moving by her own power again!
Knowing that my rig was going to be down for weeks while my valve-body flew around the globe, I decided to tackle a couple of other upgrades that I have had planned. It's time to build the T-case. I already had some Marlin crawler 3.1:1 gears sitting on a shelf so I called up cruiser outfitters and got the part time kit on the way. I opted to pull the entire case, since my Trans output seal had been leaking for months.
The case came out without drama, but I had 2 bolts break when splitting the case apart. One was a easy extraction, the other......
This was taken after I had drilled the hole for a extractor. I filled the hole with PB blaster, and heat cycled the case and bolt about a dozen times with a propane torch, just trying to get anything to move. nothing worked, and I broke off a extractor in the bolt. AT this point I just attcked it with a drill, and a dremel and anything else I had on hand to eat the bolt away.
Luckily, under that ugly gaping hole is about 1 inch of good threads, so I just left it alone at this point.
That's the biggest piece of the bolt that came out.
Unfortunately, this was barely the beginning of my T-case woes.
According to every video, and picture I could find, there is supposed to be a snap ring here. I guess it's not too important, since mine has been running for almost 30 years without it. I decided it'd be a good idea to get one ordered up just to be safe.
I paid a local Transmission shop $100 to do the press work, saved me a lot of time and frustration.
During reassembly, the input shaft seal inverted, and ripped. One more week down.....actually make that 2 weeks because partsouq fxxxed up the order.
Finally got it back together, and added a 1/4' vacuum T, so I can run the rear diff breather up and combine it with the T-case breather line.
On to the Valve body.
I received my valve body from wholesale automatics, and it had been poorly packaged, and was damaged in shipping.
Those two little pipes stabbed through the box, and were crushed by the weight of the VB. I was able to get the P/N and order them locally, but some idiot only ordered one, so I had to wait another full week to get the second one.
