As many of you may know, I recently - past couple months, got a LSD 4.11 JDM internals to swap into an open rear end - thank you Frank . I've been busy and deliquent and wasn't getting it swapped myself so I took it to the local subaru shop to put together. They seem to know what they're doing and so I left it with them and stopped in today to discover they've hit a hitch.
It doesn't fit back in.
They have the ring on the internals and are trying to work it back into the housing and it doesn't fit. Just straight is too big.
So my question is, who here has put one of these in? Did it go into a R160 case okay? Surely I don't need a R180. Not really looking to do that swap right now. Do the internals and the ring go into the housing seperate and then get screwed together? Did you have to grind any and if so, how much? Any noticable effects?
I'm open to ideas here. They're still willing to keep working on it but I'd like to atleast offer them some advice if someone else has done one already and can put one of these guys in.
I've seen 2 different R160 cases. A case that originally had an LSD has slightly more clearance on the driver's side (when installed in the car) than a case that didn't have an LSD. I don't remember if there's any way to tell them apart from the outside. We battled with this exact problem trying to put an LSD into a non-LSD car without changing the gear ratios - we had to swap the case as well.
We tried everything we could think of to get the diff into the case, but there was no way it would work. We didn't look into grinding it down for clearance, as we had a suitable case lying around.
"That shouldn't be a problem, since I do regularly visit the realm of subatmospheric manifold pressures." -- vrg3
Out of which? There is not much material to grind on the housing before you've lost any structural integrity. Grinding on the internals/ring gear will involve grinding most of the bolt head off. Then I gotta wonder about balancing issues....
An OEM LSD diff case is ground like that at the factory. My buddy and I rebuilt one and came across the same problem. We looked at the LSD case, and it looked like it was ground by hand, even though original. Just hit those nubs with a carbide bit. You don't have to remove much material to get it in there.
A huge thanks to everyone who's helped me through torque specs in other threads to getting the internals out to getting them back in. I love you guys .
The reason for this post though, aside from much due thank you's, is that I got the assembled rear diff back from the mechanic today. Cost me more than I'd hoped but not unexpected. The charged me three hours which I figure is justified. A little bit of grinding and they were able to put it back together.
So the answer was to grind the case. Wanted to make sure that went on record for anyone else who ran into this problem.
I'll keep you posted once I get this guy installed. Will go great with the OBX EL headers that should be showing up this week .
. I've been busy and deliquent and wasn't getting it swapped myself so I took it to the local subaru shop to put together. They seem to know what they're doing and so I left it with them and stopped in today to discover they've hit a hitch.
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