Quote Originally Posted by bigjason_5 View Post
It won't mess with the pinion depth. Pinion depth is set by shims underneath the inside tapered roller bearing. The only issue is with the crush sleeve. You are not supposed to back off the pinion nut and retighten it without replacing the crush sleeve. The crush sleeve is supposed to keep outward pressure on the bearings, which transfers to the flange and nut itself in order to keep resistance on the nut so it does not back off. If you remove it, the only way (in theory) to regain this pressure is to tighten it until the sleeve begins to crush again. Unfortunately, that would make the bearings tighter, which could cause premature wear. To be honest, if you put some RTV where the nut sits to insure you won't have a leak there, and put a bit of lock tight on the pinion threads, you should be ok. The only thing is, you are supposed to check rotating resistance to determine it has been properly torqued, and you can't do that with the ring gear installed. You can always use your best guess/judgement, if you are willing to take a risk to save a few hours.
Yes, this is all true. I just tightened the pinion nut down until I started to feel resistance. I went a hair tighter, enough to get pressure on the crush sleeve with the nut without crushing the sleeve in much more. It can be done (I mean, I did it like 30k miles ago). But like Jason said, you don't want to crush that sleeve out more.


Quote Originally Posted by JACook
If it's leaking out the driver side boot, then it's way more difficult to fix. That seal
is really tough to get to without the proper tool, or unless you're good at making
a substitute tool. But that seal is really well protected deep inside the rack, so it
fails far less often. The passenger side seal is a much more common failure, and
easy to fix.
Lol, just my luck. My rack was leaking on the driver's side. I didn't even know it until we pulled the boot off to change the inner tie rods and it had fluid in it. I wish I had my original rack rebuilt by someone locally (so I could keep the original), but my buddy just grabbed the new rack and that was done. He said they weren't numbered or anything anyway (...kinda doubt that since Ford numbers everything).