Lotus Elan and Lotus Elan Plus 2 Forums

I have a stuborn diff out put shaft - normally I tap them out per the manuel , gently, ... On this particular dif I had one come out with a bit of dificulty and the second one , well its still in the hole so to speak.... I don't want to get medievil with it and am hoping to avoid heating like you some times have to do with the out board shafts....

does any one have a bit of tribal knowledge they want to share ??

George

HEAT GENTLY!!!!

Well George, you know I have a story and its not what you really want to hear.

Its not Elan related but the diff on my Elite.

We heated the area where the bearings were until alloy housing was hot, hot, hot and then tried a slide hamer on the output shafts, no can do. We had a think for a bit and my friend Carl says take it home and cut the nose off the differential and bring it back next week. In his view the bearing wasn't the problem, the output shaft splines were stuck in the differential side gears. The Elite part of the case of the is 500GBP, the output shafts are around 250 U.S. dollars each and the case is MG midget and they are reletively cheap, readilly available and I had a 4.22 in stock. With the nose of the diff cut off there was access to the spyder gears and the locating pin was poped out (on examination for the photos it appears that we just drove the shaft through and sheared off the retaining pin) and the two non-side gears fell out. Now there was access to the side gears with the splines which is where it was stuck. More heat applied with the oxy/accetelene, this time directly on the spyder gears. If I remember correctly I was able to wedge a chissel in-between the the side gears and drive it through to get the output shaft to start to move and then it was back to the slild hammer. Once we had the first output shaft out more heat on the other side gear and we were able to drive it out with a drift.





The good news is the diff is back together and ready to install, I recycled part of alloy case (maybe I got half a dollar for it), its some where in China or maybe its altready back in the U.S.A.

Gary

Hi Gary - I almost picked up the phone to ask you about this last night ... However - the pictures and story .. well, lets just say I will be taking my time on this one.....

Gerry - I knew heat was an option, i would like to have the part under tension , that way I could go slow with the heat..

Some times when things have to come a part there is just no way to save every major component. In the case of the Elite diff, we chose to distroy the cheapest, easiest to get part. The housing was being disassembled to swap the 4.55 to the 4.22 ratio anyhow. New seals and bearings were part of the plan so in the end it took a little extra time and we lost only the diff housing which was too bad but some times you just have to choose between ruining some parts and getting to objective. My friend Carl has over 40 years of getting things apart and getting them back together, it's good to have a friend like that around who you can trust that has probably been confronted many times with those types of scituations in the past .
Kind of funny, I got a call from someone who needed a Cortina rear axle housing, the axle housing is good but the axles themselves are questionable so I tried to pull them to swap with another set. I got the retaining bolts out of the ends and set up a puller to grab the axle. I made up a slide hammer, and gave a half a dozen pulls, more no can do. So I drove over to my friends body shop to get his 10 lb morgan knocker (big dent puller/slide hammer) and tried again this time with some heat from a propane torch. After 15 or 20 minutes the sweat was poring out and I put everything away and brought my friends puller back. Later today, I'll give Carl a call and find out what my options are but I'm afraid that I'm not going like the answer.

George, did you try with a bolt through one of the holes and against the housing, a nut under the wing of the shaft, and "screw" it out ? It worked for me, but be carfull, you put a bending load on the shaft....!

Dag

garyeanderson wrote:I recycled part of alloy case (maybe I got half a dollar for it), its some where in China or maybe its altready back in the U.S.A.

It was probably melted down and ended up in some of the new parts on my workbench waiting to go into the Elite.

Try putting in a freezer over night then try heating the alloy parts
Neil

Hi George

A couple of questions.

Alloy nose or iron?
Any locktite on the output shaft bearing that came out?
Is this something that you put together (or do you know the person that did)?
Open diff or some form of limited slip?
When was it last time it ran in a car?
Race diff? has it been run hot?
Where do you think its stuck?
Any white alloy corrosion?

Gary

George,

make yourself a slide hammer from an old intermediate shaft (the one you have lying around after the conversion to UJs or CVs).

Remove circlips, clean out any crud, heat gently with say a propane torch (after freezing the whole assembly overnight as previously suggested).

The heat is very important because there is a very high chance that someone has used threadlok (or bearing glue) to prevent the outer race of the bearings from rotating in the soft alloy casing: the heat will destroy the adhesive.

Tap gently with the slide hammer you have made (this ensures the force is perfectly in line).
Good luck

Hi gents,

This piece is out of an S1 that has been off the road since 1984 - as far as I know it is a stock diff - iron nose , nothing special inside. May have been apart before now - shaft that came out has SKF bearing on it , no evidence of locktite. The stuborn shaft has started to move some so who knows maybe with some heat and carful presure it will come out , will get back on it this weekend and report back - will try to heat before freeze as I don't know if SWMBO will take another car related itme in the spare firg/freeze - my storage of the carcengenic PPG paint harners in the fridge did not win me any points....

George