My car is in its 6th year, but only covered 34k miles, plenty of them are short journeys, but also a few long distance Euro tours.
The rear diff has been thumping for quite a while now, so decided to change the oil.
First jack the car and support on axle stands. Access to the fill plug is tight. As you look from the rear of the car, it’s a small 5/16” hex drive plug, on the left side of the differential, towards the rear.
Needless to say, before you drain anything from the diff, make sure you can undo this plug. You’d look pretty silly if you drained it then found you couldn’t remove the filler plug!
To access and remove the plug I used a 5/16 hex drive, on a 3/8 long extension and ratchet. If you feed the long extension along the rear of the drive shaft, you can get on the fill plug and undo it.
Once it’s out, you can then use your 3/8 drive ratchet to undo the drain plug. It’s at the bottom of the diff.
Obviously put your measured catch receptacle in place first and have a rag handy. Drain into the pot, I got about 700 ml of black, very black! oil out.
Replace the drain plug and tighten to 25nm. That’s not very tight by the way, so I recommend using a torque wrench, and if you haven’t got one, don’t over-tighten it.
The oil I used was from Opie Oils, it’s the Motul gear 300 LS 75w-90 fully synthetic limited slip differential oil. It’s clear and green in colour!
I used a Sealey hand pumped oil dispenser to fill the diff. Measure the correct quantity of oil into the pump (860ml) and simply put the pipe end into the fill port and pump all the oil in.
Now refit the fill plug, it was a bit of a fiddle but once you get the thread started just use your hex socket via the driveshaft hole to tighten it to 25nm.
Clean up any spills, lower the car, job done, put the coffee on!
The rear diff has been thumping for quite a while now, so decided to change the oil.
First jack the car and support on axle stands. Access to the fill plug is tight. As you look from the rear of the car, it’s a small 5/16” hex drive plug, on the left side of the differential, towards the rear.
Needless to say, before you drain anything from the diff, make sure you can undo this plug. You’d look pretty silly if you drained it then found you couldn’t remove the filler plug!
To access and remove the plug I used a 5/16 hex drive, on a 3/8 long extension and ratchet. If you feed the long extension along the rear of the drive shaft, you can get on the fill plug and undo it.
Once it’s out, you can then use your 3/8 drive ratchet to undo the drain plug. It’s at the bottom of the diff.
Obviously put your measured catch receptacle in place first and have a rag handy. Drain into the pot, I got about 700 ml of black, very black! oil out.
Replace the drain plug and tighten to 25nm. That’s not very tight by the way, so I recommend using a torque wrench, and if you haven’t got one, don’t over-tighten it.
The oil I used was from Opie Oils, it’s the Motul gear 300 LS 75w-90 fully synthetic limited slip differential oil. It’s clear and green in colour!
I used a Sealey hand pumped oil dispenser to fill the diff. Measure the correct quantity of oil into the pump (860ml) and simply put the pipe end into the fill port and pump all the oil in.
Now refit the fill plug, it was a bit of a fiddle but once you get the thread started just use your hex socket via the driveshaft hole to tighten it to 25nm.
Clean up any spills, lower the car, job done, put the coffee on!
. After my curry ...
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