Looking back to when I first had gotten the car and started working on it, I really have started to notice just how many problems it had, I didn't post every issue on here, there were a lot I haven't brought up, mainly because they were pointless to post on here as nobody cares about changing out a caliper for a new one that's exactly the same.
This was my last issue I had for a while, and one that scared the living crap out of me at first, but in the end led to something interesting. The car developed a loud clunking noise coming from the rear when under load, but it was quiet when off the throttle. Oh boy, please don't tell me my diff is going out! Looked under the car and well, everything looked fine. The axles were solid and in tact, drive shaft looked fine, nothing banged up anywhere, sooo I guess it must be the diff. So I pulled it out of the car to check everything over.
This didn't make any sense! Everything was perfectly fine, I couldn't find a problem with it at all, the bearings were in great shape, all the gears were in great shape, and the diff wasn't starving of oil. I had no idea what the problem was. Then it hit me, the CV joint on the axle was the problem. When I putt stress on it and wobbled it a little it was really notchy feeling and would make a clicking noise when doing this by hand. So that meant I took my diff apart for nothing...NO! I didn't do all that work just to look at it and put it back together! I had read up on changing the ring and pinion with one from a Pathfinders front diff, this changing the ratio from 4.08 to 4.625! Since I have such a strong Honda background, really short gears are something that I have grown fond of so this sounded like a perfect idea.
Determined to do this I set sail for Car Country in Newton where I found a wonder treasure. Patherfinders all over the place! Only they were buried behind other cars and I couldn't get to them, after spending an hour or more looking around the place I stumbled across one where I had some access to it. The place was closing in 30 min so I had to head back out the next day.
Woke up that morning ready to get some work done, had already packed the tools up, and knew where the car was at. That's when I heard it, there was a noise on the windows. Rain. Screw it, this wasn't going to stop me. Headed on out to the junk yard to get some work done.
Got out to the junk yard where the workers simply lifted the front of the car up with a tractor and set it down on some wheels that were stacked up...holly janky ghetto stands...I risked my damn life going under that car.
My close friend at the time, Leon (that's him in the pic) came out there with me to help with the task. We spent all day working on getting this damn diff out. All the bolts came out nicely except for 2 axle bolts which we couldn't access, also there wasn't enough clearance to get the diff out either. We spent several hours hammering pulling prying kicking pushing, you get the idea, and it still wouldn't come out. Luckly a FB post alerted another friend of mine Matt Cossel who lives in the area to come out and see what I was up to. He came bearing the gift of strength and something to pry with that worked better than what we had. We ended up getting her out 5 min before the placed closed!
Got to work on it right away, and it didn't take long to remove the ring and pinion.
The stock 240 is the top one, and the Pathfinders is the bottem one.
Here's a shot of the gear ratio's just to show you it is a 4.625. In
case there is anyone that has no idea how I got 4.625 out of looking at
this, you simply divide the number of teeth on the ring gear by the
number of teeth on the pinoin. In this case 37 divided by 8.
Then bolted everything up to my S15 HLSD diff.
After getting everything back together I threw her back into the car, tossed in a new axle and went out for a test drive. This gear made one hell of a difference! You really notice it on the highway too.
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