Agh, signs of the old original oil that is just tar with chunks of…. something in it now coming out.

First inspection and the pinion looks good. So far it's promising. Notice the yellow paint stripe, this is the timing mark as this gear set is semi-hunting.

Remove the dropout housing bolts and then work on getting the copper washers up and out.

I used a scraper to get in there and break the seal on the old RTV.

It doesn't look too bad at this point. Again you can see the mating timing mark.

At this point I had power washed the interior of the axle housing out with a 3000 PSI pressure washer and dish detergent. It did a really nice job on cleaning the interior goop out.

It removed all the old thick tar like oil out of the tubes.

I just ran the third member in the parts washer to remove most of the old oil.

Now I will temporarily reassemble the axle to seal it up against the 3000 PSI pressure washer with media blaster attachment to "wet sand" blast the exterior and remove the oxidation.

This is junk that was in that axle that drained out the pinion support area. This cannot be good for the pinion or carrier bearings.

This is how the axle housing came out from water sand blasting.

First I'll start on the pinion support.

Remove the pinion nut and use a gear puller to grip the ears of the yoke and press on the pinion shaft. The yoke isn't that tight and slide off easily with the puller.

Tap the pinion through with a soft mallet and remove the seal. That sand is what was trapped under the yoke sleeve from water sand blasting.

This is where it gets interesting. Even a low mileage axle (60K+ miles) and the bearings aren't good looking. This bearing has a dark wear spot in the middle.

Plus some of that junk in the drain pan no doubt was caught up in here and grooved some of the rollers where it will catch your finger nail. Not good and these bearings will have to be replaced.

Here you can see the race with the centre wear spot and junk impregnated in the race.

The other pinion race has junk embedded in its surface as well.

Plus the roller portion is all gouged up.