With the shim tool, you could do it without, and the shim tool became much less important after the spreader was in, but we still needed it. I honestly donāt know how anyone could get the backlash right without it, without putting it in with too few shims.
Stainless to aluminum - you need to know WHICH stainless alloy it is. Some will be fine, some not so much.
We spent part of a quarter in college on differentials............. never used a spreader. No shop I worked in had one. Yeah, really nice to have, but.......... I guess it depends on how risk adverse you are. I've seen guys bust brittle spacers and wrinkle shims trying to pound things in (likely they went on to work for Ford adjusting trunk lids and door hinges with the big mallet and 2x4)
I've seen guys screw up and then try to drive that cup back out with a drift punch instead of the correct tool - destroying the shims in the process.
make sure you use anti-seize on those .. dissimilar metal likes to boldAnd just for fun Iām switching out all diff cover bolts for stainless the lower 6 are missing since I didnāt feel like putting the diff skid on. Iām tired.
Use the correct anti-seize...........
when I said "Glitter Bomb" that was not referring to shiny oil that was a reference to scattered parts after opening the diff cover
Most seem to use that term to describe the look of the fluid rolling out, like metallic paint, glittery paint - glittery oil. Ooooh, pretty oil, looks like a brown metallic paint! Not cool. Not pretty on the bank account.
Clearly old school experience lets you carefully tap shims with a soft body hammer or similar. And a fair amount of that was done. But for us diy guys, Iāll use a spreader every time after seeing how much easier it was.
My initial thought was to not use Antiseize. My expert didnāt think I should, and heās running stainless hardware in his 2 door JLR with 5.38ās without issue.
I took it that way. No bomb. But I suspect thatās because Iāve changed the fluid 3 or four times since this started failing. So Iām guessing a decent amount of it went into a pan without me realizing it.
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I have only been indirectly involved in 2 of those type set ups . One was multiple tries on shims the other one the order of original shims was carefully noted and literally went right back .. was it exact dunno I was much younger and not really in the position to argue .
I've done a lot of stainless (quality stainless) on engines and other parts over the years. There's a lot of "dress up kits" sold for classic cars that are stainless, stainless valve cover bolts that go into cast iron heads, among other things. I've not seen issues to date.
We definitely didnāt want the same shims in this case. The pinion failure indicated a pinion depth issue as the cause, so that was out. Plus these are different stronger double john cut gears, which wasnāt the case with my 2021 manufactured revolutions. So all the specs are different for backlash.
