Well on Saturday, I decided to replace the pinion seal and flange as my rover smelled like yellow stone national park after every drive (good old diff fluid hitting the exahust manifold). It looked easy enough on the rangerover.net site with a good step by step procedure to follow, I was WRONG. I ended up spending 5 hours under the thing wrenching away at the drive shaft finally getting it off. The the nut inside holding the flange on was the easy part with an impact driver. The hardest part was pulling the stupid seal out. I rented a gear puller which was a very crappy one that did not do the job. I tried a screw driver as the instructional states not to use, and it was right, that did not work AT ALL, so don't bother. I ended up using some 6" needle nose plyers that had a 70* angle at the end and spread them out so I could pull on the base and top untill finally it came flying out. I pounded the new one in (also took awhile) and put it all back together, and NO LEAK! . Best of all, the slack that was in the drive system is gone too! Some things I noticed that would have been a problem is that if i pulled the (forgive the hack job) thing that the flange connects to, all the bearings would have probably fallen everywhere, so make sure that it is properly seated the entire time. I coud be wrong but, I wiggled it out a little accidently and I nearly had a heart attack thinking the worst, thankfully nothing happened. Just a heads up for some of you who might be planning on doing this, better safe than sorry, or in this case, better careful than cursing.

 

Thanks for giving me a laugh this morning! Nothing's ever as easy as other people make it seem. I remember the first time I replaced my front EAS bags I was trying to follow instructions saying it takes about 2 hours. Of course it ended up taking literally 8+ hours as the damn things wouldn't seal and I had to keep taking it back apart. A good friend of mine was supposed to help but ended up out of town. He got a good laugh at me from that claiming it probably would have taken us well under two hours had he been there. And truthfully the second time it went very quickly. So I say at least you got it done successfully... that's cause to celebrate.

 

Yeah it is always interesting doing DIY work. I always make things way more complicated lol. For instance with the brake job, pushing the pedal to "depressurize it" to make it easier to slide the brake cylinder back in place, only to have it come flying out the side of the vehicle LOL! The oil change was also very interesting, I did not use the right size pan and ended up running in the house and grabbing a bowl, only to come out and see it was already over flowing (I am such a clutz). This is the first time I have ever really worked on a vehicle and I am learning a lot. My other car which is much newer and hardly ever requires me to work on it but, the rover needs lots of attention. One of the reasons I bought the rover was to have something to work on and learn off of, and IM LEARNING lol.