Just received my nitro sleeves...should I be worried about stuff getting into my diff as I clean it up? Should I pull the cover and clean all the way through?

 

If you take time to prep the tubes you should be fine

 

Really depends how you plan to clean the tube. There's a youtube vid of familytime and several others doing their nitro sleeve install. You can get a pretty good idea of how/what they used for cleaning. They left the diff covers on.

I plan to leave the diff cover on. I've got a 12 gauge shotgun cleaning kit I'm going to use to clean the majority of the guck out. It's got a pretty long aluminum rod that you can fit into a drill so you can swab a lot of the dirt out and get the rotating action from the drill. Plus since it's a gun cleaning kit, you got swab and wire brush attachments as well.

If you watch that youtube vid, familytime also told me that 1 of the guys came up with the idea of using a smaller diameter pipe and stuffing a paint roller with a rod attached inside it. That way you can get the pipe pretty far in while the paint roller is still inside it but avoid pushing any guck into the diff. In the vid, you'll see him pull the pipe off, while still leaving the paint roller inside the axle tube. This allows the paint roller to "fluff" back up then you can pull the paint roller out and out comes any dirt.

My sleeves have been in the freezer since last Thursday

 

http://youtu.be/BOnQ8uLnTOw Check it out

 

I'm hoping mine will only take this long!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y5pV2NQvTQ

 

You need about 40 bucks in dry ice

 

Yeah I figured it was up there. I bought $8 worth when I was "freezing" the teraflex sleeves and that didn't even last the night

 

Decent weekend - I got the passenger side torn down, ball joints out, sleeve in and C's prepped for Gussets. Either FedEx Mis-delivered or someone stole my new Teraflex balljoints off my porch.... So reassembly will have to wait....

I made 2 tools. One for an air hammer out of some pipe fittings and large washers for under $5. The other out of 2" 0.25 square steel tube and part of a ball joint press along with a small bearing race driver. The air hammer got the sleeve to the knurl in under 5 seconds. four hits with the sledge and driver set the knurl.... I think I could have got the knurl in with the air hammer, but I still had the knuckle on and couldn't reach far enough through it. I did break the wheel speed sensor off inside the wheel bearing but was able to drill it and insert a screw into it to pull it out. No way it was coming out intact! You can see in the pic I stuck a nickel inside the driver to help stop the air hammer chisel from going through the whole thing, went clean through the nickel. I hope the drivers side goes as well as this did, after all it is an 07 JKR with 103k miles on it! Thanks for all the tips they really helped!

 

Glad it worked out!

 

Prep time took the longest but we weren't exactly rushing it either. Passenger sleeve went in probably less than 5 minutes. Of course the short sleeve on the driver's side took the longest but probably only 15-20 minutes tops.

At least it wasn't some 4 hour b.s. with the sledge/hammer and then giving up to take a grinder to the last inch like some people have done lol