Derision

I thought I'd post this, since I've posted a couple other bits along the way asking questions and so forth. I figured it'd be worthwhile to compile the whole saga in one thread.

So... somewhere around June, I started hearing a noise in the rear end and subsequently changed the fluid, which was nice and gross and nasty. I detailed that bit in this thread over here.

That didn't seem to fix anything, though, and a month later or so I was still trying to figure it out. Taking it to different places, it was diagnosed as a bad rear end, bad wheel bearings, bad carrier bearings, bad pinion bearings... and even a bad transfer case. Eventually, I took it in to some place that replaced the wheel bearings, which fixed about 90% of the noise. That bit of it, I detailed over thisaway.

But the noise didn't go away! The wheel bearings fixed around 90% of it, but the remaining 10% continued to grow and grow and grow. Finally, towards the middle of November, I started feeling a vibration while driving to work. That vibration got a bit worse, and soon the car didn't want to break 50 or 60 miles per hour.

I got it to work, and while there rotated the tires on the off chance that might be what was causing the vibration. On a whim, I figured I'd check the rear end fluid, as I hadn't done that since August. I popped out the little rubber plug, and...

Chocolate milkshake.

Having had more than my fair share of head gaskets go south, I know what the chocolate milkshake means. Confused, I made a quick change of the fluid and then headed back down to the place that had replaced the wheel bearings.

So... so... if anybody happened to be following either of those previous threads, this is the final verdict.

What was causing my wheel bearings -- and every other bearing in my rear end -- to go bad was, in fact, water. I wondered where in the hell water could've been getting into my rear end when I wasn't obviously leaking any fluid. While perusing the pictures I had taken of my rear end fluid change -- which I took to post here -- I noticed the answer.



See that little moist spot circled in red? I noticed that the new rear end I was putting in had a plate there that held down the brake line. MY rear end -- which was the second rear end, put in my the previous owner -- did not have such a plate. And instead of that plate, it had two tiny, tiny, holes sitting on top of the axle tube. I imagine that's where the plate had to attach.

So that was it. All that time, and water was leaking into the axle tubes through two little holes in the top of the thing.

I now have a shiny (er, well, slightly rusty) new Chrysler 8.25" rear in there -- 29 spline, no less! -- and it's making far, far less noise than the old one was. And it has all the plates and holes covered up like it's supposed to.

And THAT, hopefully, is the end of that.

AJH

XJGrason

Congrats !