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And it's skimming away at the iron...

I reoriented the boring bar, and extended it out enough so that it would skim at LEAST a LITTLE bit off the ENTIRE hole...

Now... to make double-dawg certain that I had a concentric axis, I put a boring bar in boring head, oriented downward, adjusted it out to make slight contact in one position, then I rotated the boring head by hand to see if it was 'tighter' at any position, and the answer was no- it placed a nice, c...

Next step is to get the differential axis aligned concentric to the milling machine's spindle. BTW... for those who'd ask, this is a Bridgeport BRJ with R-8 spindle taper. It has stock 'pancake' style drive motor, and it's set up driving the middle speed pulley basically all the time. It is driven b...

Okay, so I took a little time off to get a new engine installed in my big mower, now I'm back. So next step is to see if this 7.5" Ford Limited Slip Diff, with IHCC ring gear attached, will actually FIT inside the transaxle housing... and then, find a way to make it actually able to be assembled and...

But wait- that's not all: Next experiment was to check the pinion offset... the side-to-side positioning of the carrier, to see if the pinion mesh-clearance would be in a viable range... and also... would the differential housing actually WORK in this thing... To do that, I put the ring gear back on...

but it looks mean, don't it? :twisted: Okay, so next experiement- i pulled off the ring gear, and attempted to slip the carrier housing in... just to see if I'd clearanced the OD of the gear flange... and yes, it'll START, but once that flange is in the right side, the carrier needs to pivot left, l...

And here's the very first 'real' test... with the diff housing halves together, and the ring gear in place (not bolted, just seated)... of course, it's too big to go in the back door as-is...

Here's the 'housecleaning' in process...

Okay, so after calling it a night, and working in the office all day, I got home this afternoon and took a minute to do the finishing cuts. See... when you 'hog' metal off something, that something gets hot, which means it expands. IF you cut a hot piece of metal to some precise dimension, it invari...

Of course, this all may be an exercise in futility... ...I have NO idea wether I'll actually be able to fish this thing INTO the hind end of the housing, either in whole, or in pieces, and if the latter, if it'll actually be ASSEMBLEABLE... ...but while the whole point of this entire exercise is to ...

And now I've got it skimmed right-close to finish... there's a small 'ledge' that will hold the ring gear secure under load, but it's STILL a wee bit too large... But I'm NOT gonna cut it back right now, on account that all the other cutting has raised the housing's tamperature a bit... perhaps enou...

Okay, so I got the ring gear to clear the carrier shell, and it didn't take a whole lotta metal to make it fit... barely any, actually...

So the first few contacts were all about getting the right combination of tool type, speed ,and feed rate. That big 'window' in the side of the housing results in what machinists call 'interrupted cut'... and it's really hard on tooling at times. To make it even worse, that big gaping hole throws of...

Okay, so it was a really busy day, but I took an hour in the shop after dinner to chuck this diff carrier into the lathe. Yes, the ring gear is sitting on the tailstock backwards... that's so I can use the 'square edge' to find my initial clearance diameter. once I get to the 'finishing' stage, I'll...

Yeah, so... the IHCC ring gear and the Ford 7.5 LSD are close enough so that if I skim a little metal off the OD of the LSD housing, and a little off the ID of the ring gear, it WILL result in a compatable fit. What I have NOT established yet, though, is if I can actually get this diff carrier to sl...

Okay, so now I've got the IHCC ring gear out... time to compare it to the Ford 7.5" LSD carrier. I've got just one half of the carrier shell here for this test-fit...

Getting the remains of the rivets out of the ring gear means a little more pounding, and on some, some more grinding, as they tend to mushroom a bit...

Once the heads are off, a drift pin and hammer pushed 'em through. If that drift pin looks somehow... 'unique'... it's hand-made, using the roller shaft liberated form an old dot-matrix form printer. I made it specifically for driving spi-rol pins from Cub Cadets. If you need a carefully-sized drift...

Alright... time to see if this ring gear has a chance in #3LL of fitting...
First... grind off the rivet heads. I used an 80-grit flapper wheel... it took the head off each rivet in under a minute...

Heh... well, we'll see. If I'm successful at getting it in there, it may start an obscene trend in the tractor-pulling world.

Oh, and by the way... I tip my hat to all you guys that've adapted the SGT fine-spline setups to earlier cast iron housings... and all those that've put in Dodge Dart and Pinto diffs, shortened up the axles and re-drilled 'em for stock wheels...

but my amplifier goes up to 13.

Now, the stock Cub axle is about an inch in diameter at it's THICKEST point. There's a narrow spot just before the splines, and it's been my experience that THIS is where the axleshaft breaks... at the 7/8" area, right up against the side-gear splines. A thicker axle would solve this. The Mustang 7....

Does this seem totally sick, or over-the-top? Extreme? Well, perhaps it is, but I'm not letting that stand in my way, because I haven't even gotten to the GOOD stuff yet. There's usually just a few reasons why a shaft breaks. Materials, machinework, and metallurgy contain many, but the greatest ones...

Now, the housing has a different arrangement on the left, than right side. The axle housing is actually proud of the bearing cup mounting surface by around an inch. if I were to cut out the area where the old bearing cup surface WAS, and open up enough space for that diff to fit in, then I could mak...

The left side, on the other hand, ain't even close. Rather than try to place it on the inside, I set the housing on it's side, and placed the diff carrier left half right on TOP of the bearing shell mounting surface, to get an idea of just-how-much metal we're dealing with here.

Clearly, the 7.5 housing is longer. The ring gear mounting face MUST be lined up. The right side is almost identical... not out of reach for a little work on the lathe. The left side (up) will protrude quite a bit farther than the original cup position, and because of the limited slip's internal com...

Doesn't look too far off, does it?

But look at it from THIS angle... with the ring gears lined up...

Now here's the diff out, sitting in cups... I've placed the upper cup shims on top, so they were obvious.

Now... look at the Cub diff, and compare it to the Ford 7.5...

Now, once the side caps are out, the differential carrier, bearings, and ring and pinion lift out... but it ain't easy... you have to move it far left, then sneak the ring gear area out first, and pivot it TIGHT against the left side to get the whole assembly out.