Differential - its fitted!!!!

So a relaxing trip to Iceland provided a nice break from the stresses of work and also continued progress on the car,but good news - labour has been arranged following a last minute call from my Brother in Law and Nephew.

Suitably fed and watered with bacon rolls, crisps and tea we set too and commenced what I consider to be a defining moment of the build. Its a bit irrational really but somehow seeing the differential fitted is a landmark in the build as finally you are seeing something mechanical installed into the chassis plus it was one of the first acquisitions late last year.

Fitting kit was provided courtesy of GBS and the first puzzlement was the two 70mm hex bolts...utterly perplexed what they are for, clearly too long for the front of the diff, too short for top and bottom, a post on the GBS forum revealed nothing...am I missing something fundamental?

Thankfully I had the existing front bolts for the diff when I acquired it, so I sourced some of similar size and elected to ignore the 70mm hex bolts..anyone who has a clue what they are for please let me know!

Simple process (on paper):

• Get some heavy labour in!
• lift into position
• Insert bottom long bolt in first through slotted hole in chassis
• Insert top long bolt in 
• insert front two bolts with spring washers
• torque up

The lifting in is the awkward and cumbersome bit, and its with grateful thanks to Neil and Alex we managed to get the diff into position with Neil on his back effectively bench pressing it in from underneath and into position whilst me and Alex gave encouragement from above! (probably a more dramatic way of getting it into position, but it provided a good money shot if nothing else!)

Next we inserted the two long bolts in top and bottom centralising the differential in its position.  Spacers then need to be put in between the differential and chassis frame. Having read various blogs on this installation it is apparent the spacers need trimming down to fit and mine were no different so we spent quite a while getting the spacers to a nice snug fit through a combination of filing and bench grinding mm off each one, lining up to the gap, further filing etc remembering all the while to note which one went where - top, bottom, left, right.

Once this was done, we removed the bolts re-inserting with the spacers and washers and that was top and bottom done, attention turns to the front...

this is where progress slowed... the front holes needed opening up slightly to take the bolts cleanly through into the diff, so out with the diff, open up hole, diff back in, check for fitment. Still not right. Out with the diff, open up hole, in goes diff check for fitment...well i think you get the gist of where this is going. Fair to say this took a while to resolve but eventually we got a clean fit of all the screws and it was successfully in situ.

the top and bottom bolts were torqued up to 80nm whilst the front two stayed loose pending threadlock (to be bought) being applied before final torquing to 50nm.

With grateful thanks to Neil and Alex, without whom this would not have been achieved.

a landmark day in the build!