Transfer Case Teardown

There was a little more work to do on the gearbox and transfer case to complete the strip-down, specifically looking after the transfer case output shaft. 

This is probably the most challenging of all the operations in taking apart the LT76 gearbox and Land Rover transfer case. Most of the rest of it is fairly straightforward as long as you have cooperative parts. My gearbox parts have been... mostly? cooperative. There are some problem spots: The long studs that hold on the clutch release mechanism; those always end up spinning in the housing and are held in with a flange. There's a split ring (not a snap ring unfortunately) on the mainshaft that's tricky to remove. It's actually a big pain on these gearboxes and this was replaced in a later design with an improvement. Speaking of snap rings though, there are some *monster* ones on the bearing housings that are quite tricky to remove because they're really strong springs. I bought decent (but not awesome) snap ring pliers and this is an area I would have splurged to get a really beefy set. Learn from my mistakes!

Anyway, outside of these general problem areas it's pretty straightforward. 

Until you come to take out the output shaft. Getting the bearing races out can be a definite hassle. 

In the shop manual, you first have to hit the output shaft forward with a drift to get the bearing race out of the transfer housing. Sometimes, I imagine this will be easy. Mine was not.

I used my heaviest rubber mallet. I put the castle nut on the threads and hit that with a hammer and a block of wood. I used heat to expand the transfer housing around the race. None of it worked. 

I ended up hitting the nut so much that it stripped and deformed around the head of the output shaft:

Sigh. 

Honestly, I thought I had left the circlip in. Nothing I did was working

Finally I heated up the transfer case housing until it was *smoking* hot. Waaay hotter than I was comfortable with given it was aluminum. Then with the nut gone I had to wail on the end of the shaft. My block of wood split and I took a chunk off the output shaft. 

Ultimately, I did prevail, though possibly at the expense of some hard-to-replace components. :( 

Out came race #1, but RIP one castle nut and one transfer case output shaft, part number 235985. 

Unfortunately this actually isn't the hard part of the transfer disassembly process, if you can believe that. You have to drive out the bearing race on the rear of the transfer case too. But, and here's the kicker, you can't do it directly by hitting the output shaft like you do with the front. You can get the bearing race maybe 1/3 of the way out by driving it directly rearward, however to get it the rest of the way, you have to put some kind of suitably-sized collar in between the race and the bearing to be able to drive it far enough out of the housing. What a pain!

I obviously had nothing handy. 

What I ended up doing was taking the grinder to an old inner hub bearing (the old hubs have big and small bearing races) to make two kinda crescent-shaped wedges I could jam in there.

It was by no means pretty. It was probably an *awful* and mechanically cringey way to get the bearing race out. It took me an hour of fiddling and fucking with the thing to get it to line up. Then, as before, an absolute furnace of heat on the housing and a wood block / hammer on the stack of components shakily standing up on my workbench. 

But it worked. 

Eureka, the moment of victory. 

Honestly, I just hope I never have to do this again. What a pain in the dick. 

With a grimace (probably literally) I looked at my now-empty transfer case, gearbox housing, and front output housing and decided that I might as well finish off the process of stripping the cases for cleaning. This would naturally involve taking out all of the studs in the cases. 

This procedure is definitely tedious, but it's pretty straightforward. You just do the two-nut trick:

First, thread a nut on the stud. Then, thread another one on and use two wrenches (or in my case a wrench and a socket) to tighten them together so they lock. The nuts need to be tight. 

Then, as you can see in the right picture above, you just spin the inside nut off and should hopefully extract the stud from the housing.

To get the nuts off of the stud, I found it most convenient to use aluminum jaws in the vise: 

Tighten the vise jaws on the stud threads as tight as you can, then loosen the nuts one at a time and you should be good to go.

Put on a podcast, then lather / rinse / repeat until you've taken out all of the studs. 

At the end of the process you have some housings and some parts, probably (like mine) in various buckets and boxes. One box of parts you might be able to use, and a really heavy bucket (oil drip pan) of parts you probably can't reuse: 

Then, staring at the pile of crap on your workbench that's left over you're forced to contemplate pulling apart rusty, crap handbrake fixings next. 

Aren't classic vehicle restorations fun?