Axle is back in, and man was that chunk of iron heavy!  When we took it out, we had pulled the dif­fer­en­tial and the axle shafts out and only had to haul out the tube.  This time, we assem­bled it all on the bench, dif­fer­en­tial was back in, axle shafts with new bear­ings and seals were all installed.  Man that sucker must of weighed in at 200 – 300 lbs.  I swear you could use that thing in a dump truck.….  Any­way, with 2 of us it was eas­ier than try­ing to assem­ble it under the car.  Once we had it aligned with the lower con­trol arms it was easy, inserted the springs in their seats and used a floor jack under the dif­fer­en­tial to com­press them until we could mate the ball joint mounted on the upper yoke with the flange on the axle.  All in all, the whole process took less than an hour.

The rain stopped, so I bor­rowed my brother’s pickup and we were off to pickup the motor at the shop.  There it was, strapped to a pal­let and shrink wrapped just wait­ing for me.…  Cou­ple min­utes with the fork­lift and we were on our way back to the shop.  Orig­i­nal plans were to just drop it off, but with some time left and nowhere to go we decided to just mate it to the trans­mis­sion and drop it in the car.  It really was a long time ago that we took it apart, and our first attempt, we for­got to put the spac­ers between the thrust plate and the fly­wheel, so we ended up hav­ing to take it apart again and put it back together the right way.  Once that was done, 20 min­utes later and both the engine and tranny were back in the car.  Enough for one day, we’ll be back at it on Sunday.

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