[jkstill]

I'm not going to go too much detail here because it is well covered in the Service Manual.

You will need to remove the PPF, the drive shaft (prop shaft in the manual) and pop the axles out.

No doubt someone will dispute the need to remove the PPF and or the drive shaft. My advice is to just remove them. It isn't that hard to do, and removing the diff will be much simpler.

Don't forget to prop up the motor and tranny. I used a small screw jack on top of a stack of bricks under the transmission.

To remove the axles you can get by with removing the brakes (caliper and rotors) and disconnect the upright from the upper suspension arm. The half shafts can than be popped out of the diff and the whole assembly can be pushed back out of the way so the diff can be removed. To avoid having to deal with sealing the brake lines and then doing lots of bleeding, I just tied the calipers up to the coil spring.

In my case everything was already removed after replacing all the suspension bushings, so there was a little more room to work. That was the first time. The second time I removed the diff, I did it just as described in the previous paragraph.

Once you have the diff mounted securely, it's time to start taking it apart.

If you don't plan on salvaging the side seals, then pull them out now. They are just in the way otherwise.

The following instructions differ a bit from the manual. If this diff is mounted horizontally to a bench, this may save your fingers a bit of damage, and maybe the diff too.

Start by pulling off one of the bearing caps as shown in the pic. Then drive out the shim. I used a small chisel and a dead blow hammer.
The square edges of the chisel were ground down to better spread the load on the shim without deforming it. If the diff has been in the car a few years you may need to give it a few whacks to get started. Once the shim is out, hold on to the diff with one hand while removing the other bearing cap. Now you can ease the diff out of the case.

Had you removed both bearing caps, the diff would pop right out of the case after the first shim was removed, and then it just might roll over a couple of your fingers on its way to the floor where it will start looking for your toes.

Once the diff is out, you can remove the pinion. After setting up your brace to hold the companion flange in place, remove the pinion nut. It will be hard to remove. Get a two foot breaker bar to break this nut loose. Or if you have a capable air gun, you can probably use that. Lacking the air gun, I used a $12.00 harbor freight breaker bar.

After removing the nut, you can use a pulley or gear remover to pull the companion flange off. A 2 jaw puller worked well for me. You can also probably remove it by gently tapping the back of the flange on each side until you work it off. The puller is a little easier.

Now to remove the pinion. The FSM (Field Service Manual) says to use a brass hammer IIRC and "tap" it out by striking the front end of the pinion shaft. I'm not sure what is considered a "tap" by the engineers that wrote the instructions. If "tapping" includes whacking it quite hard with a dead blow hammer, then I guess I did it correctly. It takes some force to do this, as what you are doing is driving the pinion out of the front bearing.

Don't forget to put the pinion nut back on before you start hitting the pinion, or the threads will get pretty messed up.

Once the pinion is free, set it down and then remove the front pinion seal. Once the seal is out you can remove the front pinion bearing, crush collar and spacer.

The final bit to remove from the diff case are the races for the front and rear pinion bearings. Shown in the pics is the rear pinion bearing race being removed with a hammer and punch, and the front race just after being installed.

If all the bearings are being replaced, you will need a bearing splitter to remove the rear pinion bearing. If this is the same bearing that has been on the pinion since the car was new, you might want to just skip the bearing splitter and take it to a shop with an adequate press. The 12 ton press I tried to remove it with was starting to bend. The shop where I took has a 40 ton press and the owner said it took most of what that press could do to remove that bearing.

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