Axle problem solved !!!

This is a very happy day--I solved my rear axle problem. I ended up speaking with Lynn at John's, the company that makes the rear end stuff for Hurricane. She was absolutely delightful to deal with and managed to educate me a lot--enough to solve the problem. We quickly determined that my parts were correct, and that the problem was probably with the positraction differential. The limited slip has an extra gear in there that sometimes gets out of alignment in shipping. This made sense to me.

She gave me 2 suggestions to fix it. One involved taking apart the passenger side axle, the other required taking off the entire differential as well. Fortunately, I was able to disassemble the PS axle without too much difficulty and use it temporarily on the DS to realign the gears with the help of my big hammer. Then when I tried the correct axle back in place, it almost fit. I did just a tiny bit of grinding on the bearing housing to open it up just a miniscule amount, maybe 5 thousandths of an inch or so. I had done some measurements with a new digital caliper and determined that the outer diameter of the bearing was just too big compared to the housing it needed to go into. Hopefully, I will not have done anything that will bite me down the road with any leakage. The cheap little grinding stone I used could not have done much in the few seconds I hit the circumference.

In the end, everything went in very smoothly. It took about 75 minutes, once I was good to go. Overall, I spent almost 11 hours on what should have been a one hour job. Here is a pic showing the axle in place. You can also see the emergency brake, the whitish drum area.

Next, I put on the rotors. When you apply the brakes, this is what gets grabbed.


Then I installed the brake shoes and calipers. I ran into a little problem here as the manual just said do it. At first, I put the outer brake shoes on the wrong sides as I did not realize that there was a difference, but there was a little clip that had match up on the inner and outer pads. Figured that one out myself. Then, when I went to install the calipers, it turns out that the bolts which fasten them to the backing plates were metric! The manual never mentioned that, so I had to run to Sears to buy a 10mm socket. Then it went very smoothly.



Finally, I hit another big milestone. The first empty boxes hit the curb...