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DANA 44 AXLE SWAP |
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Project 8
Axle Swap on a Dana 44
Installed by Will Morgan
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With that done we simply put the replacement axle shaft into the axle housing and slid it into the spool making sure the shaft was clean and free of debris. We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any dirt or anything else that wasn’t supposed to be there put in when we did the swap. Be careful not to allow any foreign particles of dirt, sand or gravel inside of your differential or axle housing when doing any kind of work to it.
Before putting the shaft all the way in be sure you grease the bearings well with a good bearing grease that you should be able to find at any parts store. Liberally grease the bearing by rolling the bearings around getting not just the outside but some in the roller bearings as well.
Now push the shaft in (depending on if you have lockers, a spool or an open diff this process may differ from application to application) since this has a spool it slid into the locker and then we put the bolts in the plate that holds the bearing in and the shaft in place and tightened them down.
Now that we have the axle shaft back in place we can put the rear diff cover on and put the new gear oil in. We picked up a new gasket from our local NAPA Auto Parts as well as the gear oil that we will be putting. Make sure everything is clean on the cover, the rear diff and gasket before installing.
Put the bolts back in and tighten them down and then you will be ready to put the gear oil in.
Take the plug out of the cover and begin by putting in the fluid and continuing to fill it until the fluid begins to drain out of the fill/check hole. You can put your finger in to gauge how close you are to having it topped off as you go. Once it is full replace the plug and tighten.
Now we are ready to reassemble the brakes, as you can see here things were pretty well destroyed and even some parts were missing so we are going to go ahead and replace everything brake related except for the drums. While we have this much of it apart, we might as well clean things up and get it working at its best.
Here we are going to start by removing the wheel cylinder so we can replace it with a new one.
First we have to remove the brake line, unfortunately the fitting on this line had been rounded off by either the wrong size wrench being used or carelessness in the past so in order to remove it we had to use vice grips to get a good enough of a hold on it to break it loose. That being the case the choice was made to go ahead and completely remove the rear brakes lines and replace them too since the damage had been done. If the proper brake line wrench had been used in the past this may have been avoided. Hence the importance of using the right tool for the job.
With the brake line removed we are ready to swap old for new, on the back of the drum are two bolts that hold the wheel cylinder in place. Simply remove them and get the old cylinder out and replace with the new. We also went ahead and replaced the old e-brake cables while we had this much torn down and were replacing everything else with new components.
