One question I asked was about cutting oil for the drilling and tapping portion. One of the techs told me they now use an expensive Mobil 1 cutting oil for all their work, but that they used to use regular motor oil. So, I used some old Mobil 1 oil left over from an oil change.
On to the work. I did all of this in my rocky, un-level driveway, with a minimum amount of tools. For all the work, all I used was the bottle jack that comes standard with the Jeep to do all the lifting (stacked on several blocks of wood).
First, the before picture of the DS:
The IRO kit came with the bolts necessary to remove my transfer case drop, which was super convenient. For anyone wondering, they are M10 x 40 hex bolts.
All the old bolts came out pretty well, except one, which I used PB Blaster and a little heat from a torch to remove. I followed IRO's suggestion and used anti-sieze on the new bolts I put in.
Next, I removed the old drive shaft. The bolts on the rear pinion yoke came out pretty easily, after I used a little PB blaster. The hardest part was rotating the shaft to get acces to all the bolts (had to roll the Jeep forward a bit). I measured the distanced specified by IRO, then put blue tape around the output shaft and started to cut using a 4 1/2" angle grinder with a 1/8" thick cutoff wheel.
I rotated the shaft by hand every few seconds to help make the cut more uniform. I also went very slowly (removed the cutting wheel every few seconds) and took a break half way through to keep the shaft from heating up too much. I was worried about overheating the seals (though I don't know if that is a legitimate concern).
In hindsight, I wish I had just made the cut with the Jeep running in reverse, so that the output shaft was spinning. I ended up doing this anyway, and using a grinding wheel to smooth and straighten my cut. The shaft spun a lot slower than I thought it would, so it wouldn't have been very hard to make the cut with the shaft spinning.
On to the drilling and tapping. I used an old windex bottle to spray the motor oil into the hole while I was drilling. I marked the center of the shaft by sliding the new yoke on, then pushing a permanent marker through the center hole. It would've been better to use a large drill bit that just barely fit through the hole in the yoke to start a small hole in the center of the shaft, but I didn't have one available. My hole was slightly off, but everything bolted up just fine.
I backed the drill bits (first drilled a small hole, then the larger one) out every few seconds to clear chips and keep the drill bit from overheating. The drill bits supplied by IRO worked just fine for this process, and didn't seem to get dull. I also used the tap from the IRO kit. The kit didn't come with a tap handle, which I was disappointed with at first (since I did't have one). After getting under the Jeep, though, I realized that a tap handle probably wouldn't have fit in the drive train tunnel. I ended up using a small #10 box wrench to turn the tap and that worked perfectly.
I was too oily to take pictures after all this, so all I have are pictures of the new yoke and shaft installed.
The whole installation took me about 3.5 - 4 hours to do by myself, including a break to eat and take pictures part way through cutting the shaft. I'm very happy with the kit so far.
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