Got dirty looks by doing some snow donuts at Lowe’s, few days later I pulled the sixty out of garage and brought the LX in for some wrenching.
Continued what I assumed would be some uneventful fluid swaps as part of my 200k pm/baselining. Successfully did the rear diff, center diff, and greased the front and rear shafts/propellers
Then everything went bad…figured my nice and clean “southern LX” wouldn’t have the notorious seized front diff drain plug…I was wrong…. Stripped the Allen hole…. Tried a torx, no dice…. Tried pliers… tried chiseling…. Pb blasted for days.
Then decided to try “just weld a nut one”….. Initially tried on outside, then realized couldn’t get the socket to bite, then filled the hole blindly by feel…insert jokes here…. went through three nuts and all kept snapping off…so went to hardware store
After a good night sleep decided to try a new route. Deleted the mound of weld from the nuts…. Kind of nerve racking given the strange angles and lack of space to get a disc in there
Tooak a half x 1.5” bolt, added another big nut to it, fused them together, ground off threads, did some careful balancing of a 3/8” steel flat bar to hold the end carefully to plug. Welded one, used socket to snap it off… repeat this two times.. clean everything back up again, curse, get scared repeat
On my third attempt I just shot a ton from every angle…. Sadly got a drip that connected plug and case.. yikes .. very careful surgery with cutoff wheel.. then small chisel.. phew that was a close call…. Deep breath
Happy to announce, my 9th attempt finally worked…. It finally released! Well it’s Miller time, I’m gonna do an uneventful fluid swap later because that was too stressful… always amazes me how a simple job turns into days of drama