On a recent journey towing an empty trailer the rear diff on my 52 reg freelander TD4 started making a horrible grinding noise, by the time I stopped it sounded like teeth had stripped and there was a strong smell of diff oil. When I looked underneath it looked like the drive shafts had somehow pulled slightly out of the diff and this is where the oil was leaking from. As I can't afford to repair it at the moment I was considering converting it to two wheel drive at least until I can afford to do the job properly.
What I would like to know is can I just isolate the diff by removing the prop shaft and the two rear drive shafts and leave the broken diff in the casing? Or is it more complicated than that?
Has anyone ever done this and if so can they please advise me of any pitfalls. I don't really need the four wheel drive as I have a diesel P38 that can do all the donkey work.

 

You need to remove the guts of the diff, it is still going to turn with the wheels and the input shaft (whats sticking out) will still turn and continue to be chewed up.
So you will need to remove the rear driveshaft and the rear diff.
Honestly I think it would be easier to remove the rear driveshaft and the 2 rear half shafts and leave the diff in place.

 

The front diff is in the transmission, it is just like a FWD car, only with a output shaft to send power to the back axle.
So only trans fluid level can be checked and not the front diff fluid level...because it is lubed by the trans fluid.

 

If you remove the rear half shafts including the outer cv joints and try to
drive the wheel bearings will self destruct and the rear wheels will fall off.
Don't recall what will happen if you take the driveshaft w/ viscous coupler out of the picture..
Freelander has an IRD unit that is part of the driveline, it has gear oil in it.

You may just need to pop the axle back in cause your diff moved and an axle popped out

 

The hubs on a Freelander are one sealed unit, they should be fine with no half shafts installed.
Hub Assembly Front Or Rear for Freelander | Land Rover wheels, tires, hubs, axles
Yes the rear diff has gear oil in it but if its not turning it does not matter if it is empty.
Please correct me if I am wrong, with pics or diagrams so I can better understand.

 

The sealed rear wheel bearing and hub are pressed together and relies on the cv joint and the nut/bolt to hold it together. Without the c/v joint and nut there is nothing to keep the bearing and hub from seperating (loosening) and failing when a load is applied. They will come apart.
I was making reference to the front ird unit that has gear oil in it.
All this just sounds way more complicated than either trying to reinstall
the axle that came loose and fix the reason it came loose or just find a cheap used diff if needed and replace it.

Cheers

 

Thanks for the advice guys but I'm still none the wiser (however a bit better informed), Spike555 is saying that it should be ok to run with no shafts in, and Threalassmikeg is saying it is saying that it's defiantly not. ???????

 

If you want to remove the rear drive shafts and try it go ahead. This involves removing a bunch of control arm bolts on both sides of the vehicle and an axle nut on each side that is very tight. Once you remove the driveshafts you will need to remove the outer cv joints from both driveshafts and reinstall them on the vehicle. You will probably ruin the outer cv boots, and who knows.. maybe the cv joint. If you ever wanted to put it back to stock, (ie: this idea didn't work or you found a diff) you would now be spending more money (that you don't have) to fix the stuff you have now destroyed.
Getting back to the work around...When you're at this point with the rear axles removed you now have 3 or 4 mounting bolts 6 driveshaft bolts and the diff falls out.
Get what I'm saying here?
I don't have a problem with trying "work arounds" there are a lot of ingenious ideas people come up with
(many which I'd have never thought of).
In this case IMHO, I think trying to perform this work around is going to cost you more than trying to find and fix the root problem which may just be that the rear diff mounts got so loose that both axles popped loose from the diff.
I'm not there to see the carnage though..

Sorry to Debbie Downer here...

 

No, you have pointed out the lesser of two evils. It will cost less to fix it, rather than re-engineer it, even if you came up with some kind of bolt to replace the hold-together function of the CV shaft.

 

Thank you for clarifying.