Well, I’ve been reading in this Fourm for awhile now and figured it was finally time to sign up since I’m having problems , I’ve had this 4 Runner for a while now , I drive it every single day , she has 295,000 miles everything is original on it , the wake tower speakers are a great cheap cool factor & everyone notices , I’ve replaced the entire front end , bed lined the inside (I do not recommend that if you live in the Mississippi delta like me , the mud loves to stick to it and it’s a pain to clean out , I did have a cluster give out on me but I have a parts truck that is almost complete . I get 20mpg on average, and absolutely love this thing! I’m currently working on the Rear diff and having problems getting it sealed correctly , i replaced it yesterday at 3pm and when I drove it this morning and got to work I smelled gear oil and low and behold it was coming out the the differential gasket , no auto parts store within 50miles of me has another gasket. so I’ll be using nothing but gasket maker this afternoon when I pull it apart , the seal on the shaft wasn’t even there when I pulled it all apart so it’s been open before I’m guessing . If you have any suggestions I’m all open to them as I’m completely lost trying to figure out how or why it blew . I’ll post more pictures after work.

Everyone that’s done this before is pretty certain that my breather is clogged , I’ll start working on it here shortly. And my question is should I stand down both the housing and chunck sides ? Of course using really find sand paper .

Well we hit it with some fine sand paper to get the 32 year old gasket off it was the original one on there without a doubt . After 6 hours of everything tonight we finally got it back together and the Mopar gasket maker is holding perfect , unfortunately the pinion seal i replaced is leaking now , it’s not bad enough for me to put it out of commission (it’s my daily driver and I refuse to allow it to fail me even once ) so tomorrow I hope that my local orileys has another national brand seal as their name brand one isn’t snug against that shaft . I’m also worrying about the pinion but , I’m not sure what the torque spec is . I can’t find that anywhere , and when we put the new seal in I didn’t even see an old seal whatsoever . , unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures tonight I was rushing to get everything put back together because between work and this Toyota and hunting season coming I’ve been swamped .

Well here’s the update on my diff , got it all back together the truck runs and drives fine , no noise & is t leaking around the new gasket , come to find out after looking at that web page about the gears ; I left the old pinion seal on and put the new one on there so I’m running two pinion seals . It’s leaking where the pinion seal is so I ordered a new pinion seal and also a pinion nut from trailgear.com . I’m driving the truck because it isn’t leaking too bad at all .