The ring gear looks in good serviceable condition. Which is good because this a 2.75:1 gear set and I haven't seen this ratio reproduced.

The pinion drive and coast side teeth also look in good serviceable condition.

The differential gears (spider gears) look ok. These shouldn't be used much unless you have odd size tyros on the back of the car.

OK, so all the critical parts in the differential seem to be ok. Next is to remove the axle shaft bearings and see how they look.

This is a two step process. First is remove the locking collar.

Use a chisel and just hit enough to make a 'V' in the top portion of the collar and the lower portion of the collar. Do not try to cut through the collar. If you hit that axle shaft and make a sharp edge, you could create a stress riser and the axle shaft can break right there in operation.

Just like this. This stretches the collar and it will just slide off at this point.

Now the bearing. I do not have a press large enough to reverse press the bearing off, so I'll get a little caveman on this.

What I do is crack off the outer race first with a hammer. Wrap the axle in heavy towels to prevent shards flying everywhere.

A couple medium whacks with the ball peen end and the outer race is apart. Now we can see what's going on inside.

Here you can see where moisture ingress caused corrosion and yes you could feel this spinning the bearing by hand. So even "low mileage" is meaningless here.

You can see the corrosion on the balls.

Next is removing the inner race. First I make a slice into the race, HOWEVER, not all the way through, you DO NOT want to hit the axle shaft with the cutoff wheel, if you do, buy a new axle shaft.

This is what your aiming for.

Now all you have to do is place a chisel in the groove and use a light to medium hammer blow to crack the race.

This ended up on the violent side and a part of the race flew off. It did crack and then you can slide it off. Rinse and repeat for the other axle. That one came off with one light whack and a crack along the cut portion and slide off without drama. That bearing also had water damage internally. Both axle shafts check out fine and I can move onto the housing and correcting it.

First up, is tapping the vent hole for 1/8" NPT. The original vent is just pounded in at the factory and is a loose fitment. I checked the depth of cut with a spare fitting.

Then I re-welded the rear outer cover. I just ran a bead around it completing where the factory rework left off.

Now to leak test the rear cover. This cleaner has a viscosity of close to one (water) and will not oxidize steel, plus it just gives it another round of cleaning.

It's filled up the rear cover area. Being low viscosity and a green tint it will bleed through any porosity in the weld or steel in short order.