Will do and anyway, I need to get the truck serviced. One thing I made sure right after that was to clean all the mud from underneath, suspension, differential,...all the place where it could have packed up and caused problems.

 

Yep we always joke, 1 minute of playing = 3 hours of cleaning.

I've known memmbers of my off road trails club that have tried to cheat the cleaning process and then went to take off one winter day and shatter thier diffs becasue of frozen water that had seeped in.


But it's worth every second and every penny.

Your wife was driving too???

That rocks dude!
My wife just rides with me on occasion. She's never driven off road.

 

yep, you would be surprised, she can handle ATVs and rock crawlers. She drove the zuk and the jeep back in arizona and to add to it, both were standard transmission. She is good and me I was laughing hard watching the faces of the guys passing by, they were stunned

Anyway, I checked my truck and one thing, I did not observe any liquid coming out anywhere, since when something comes in, something has to come out.

Alright, better get back to doing the yard, my wife will kill me if it is not done
oh, and I will get a beer on my way out, beautifull outside

Cheers

 

SWWWEEEET!

Yea we couldn't afford two of us with trail rigs....
She does like to work on them and she is just as good as I am with a wrench. So we make up a comparably inexpensive team.

I tear it up then we fix it.

Just wish I wouldn't tear so much up....


Nope. Your not suppose to fill your diffs plum ot the top. There is suppose to be about 25% air space. You only fill them to the fill hole which is about 3/4 from the bottum. If your gears were fully submerged in grease then you would get air bubbles trapped between the gears so would be unprotected metal.
So unless it filled the diff with water then you wont see anything come out.
If your frontend is under water then you will need to take the diff cover off, drain it and refill it. If both are under water at any point then do both.




I had to get rid of my Jeep last fall so we could afford to run the boat.
So many toys, so little money....

I do miss the trails already and now that we are out of the 2 year drought... naturally now that I sold my rig, the mud is deep and rough with all this rain that we've gotten the last 2 months.

She has the only 4wd left on the property now and she wont let me beef it up any and take it out. I've taken the 150 out in some mild trails. (well mild to us, Others are getting stuck) But it only has street tires and I don't want beefy on a 2wd. and I'm not willing to challenge myself to hard in it yet anyway, (IE we can't aford to fix it). The street tires just dont seem to clean out to well though.

If the weather holds like this I may have to grab a spare pair of fugly and cheap rims and mount some meats on them to slap on the back before venturing out and maybe play some harder.

 

I will pass by the garage and get it checked, or I might bring it to 4wheels parts. If anything, the bottom of the front end was sitting in the mud not in the water. Anyway, will see that, the way I look at it, my nissan has been sitting in water for much longer but never had a problem following that after 87,000 miles so I am not worrying too much about the ford. I would hope that the seals are better on the new trucks then the old ones.

thanks anyway for the advice, does not hurt to check.

 

Yea my old jeep I'd take it out 2 or three times before changing the fluids. It went 200K with me and it's still going with the new owner.

It doesn't come in thru the seals, it's the vent tube on top of the gear cases and diffes. It's just a hole with a rubber line, no check valves or anything. Each gear case, (ie transfer, tansmission or differential) has thier own vent tube to let air and built up gases from the gears churning the fluid to escape. The differential vent tubes are the lowest ones on a vehicle. Alot of guys will add extentions and run them up higher to help prevent water from getting in when off roading and some others will plug them up and cap them off while on the trail. I'm not a big fan of that personlly.

The worst one I ever got into was I drove thru some silt, when I poped the differential covers off each drive the next weekend, it had gotten a gritty silt in the differentials thru the vent tubes. Seals were brand new and I run with vent tube extensions on. I had to pull the Diffs and take them apart, take all the parts, gears and all to my local machine shop and have them steam cleaned to get the grit out. These were fairly new Detroit Lockers, I was not happy to say the least.

There is no need to take it to a shop, if you have a 3/8 drive ratchet, pop the fill plug off (sometimes it is a bolt sometimes it's a plug that just uses the square drive of your ratchet) I just changed my rear end grease last fall, but also did wifes explorer, the jeep, and the trans am all at the same time. So I can't remeber waht teh truck was. The fill hole plug is on the same side as your drive shaft in the upper middle of the case. Just stick your finger in. If the grease has any hint of a milky white or light grey then that is water. Simply undo the bolts around the diff cover starting at the bottum to let the grease drain out. Reinstall cover and fill back up.
Total time = 20 mins tops.
Difficulty level on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the hardest. It's a 1
If you can change your oil then you can check or change your diff fluid levels.

I change the rearend grease anually, just before winter, on my daily drivers. Only suppose to do it every 30K miles, but living in the country on a poorly maintained gravel road, I drive thru a lot of crap everytime it rains. So just incase any water got in then I want to get it out. It never hurts to add fresh lubrication of anything before the maximum recomended time anyway.