While loosening the rear axle, we noticed that there is a lot of stuff you will have to think about before lowering the entire assembly. To do a proper renovation of the rear axle, it is probably best to remove the entire gearbox with rear axles. It is not such a big deal when you take notice of the following items:
Take the rear bumper off.
Remove the engine.
Loosen the brake hoses.
Don’t forget the shock absorbers.
Unhook the hand brake cables and pull them out to the rear of the van.
The rubber protection around the hand brake cable at the back of the brakes can be pulled out in a natural way (no screw thread). You might require penetrating oil, or depending on the state of your axles; a lot of penetrating oil.
Next step is to remove the oil from the gearbox and reduction boxes. Please, do it now and don’t open up the assembly before the last drop of oil is out; gearbox oil is a thick, syrup like substance and you are just better off not having it all over the place. Underneath the gearbox you will find two hexagon socket bolts. In case you don’t have such a big socket head wrench, try welding a nut to a bolt; worked fine for me. You will find the same bolts underneath the reduction boxes; the ones on top are for filling.
Now that we have removed the oil we can lower the gearbox and axle assembly. Make sure the entire assembly is well supported by either a jack or blocks of wood. Loosen the bolts that attach the reduction boxes to the spring plates (4 at each side). Next, loosen the bolts that attach the gearbox to the chassis; two big ones at the rear and two at the front, near the gear-changing rod. If possible, loosen the gearbox from the gear-changing rod before lowering the entire gearbox-axle assembly, so you will not need an additional 3 meters of free space behind your van…
Before you can separate the axles from the gearbox, remove the brakes at the ends of the axles. As soon as you have removed the brake shoes and brake cylinders, you can remove the four bolts that keep the oil seal in place. When this is removed should be able to remove the back plate of the brake assembly. Now you can reach the bolts that attach both reduction box halves; loosen and you can take off the outer half. Use a pulley extractor to remove the bearing at the end of the axle. Before doing so, make sure you removed the little clamp which prevents you from removing the bearing. When the bearing and the gear have been removed from the axle, you can shove the reduction box and axle cover off the inner axle and take the assembly off the gearbox.
We have reached the point of renovating the separate parts; we sand blasted the rusted axles and reduce boxes, carefully covering the insides so the sand won’t damage it. As we didn’t have the proper tools to remove the inner reduction box half from the outer axle shaft, we decided to leave it together and just being a little bit more careful. After several layer of primer and pain, your axles are ready for another few decades of humble duty.
