TL;DR alert. I have been doing a job that keeps me away from the car for days at a time, so not much is getting done as of late. Here's a week of catchup:
I replaced an axle seal and got into the middle of replacing a damaged wheel stud when I found out that I bought the wrong stud.
Got the right one now, but haven't installed it yet. As an aside, I suggest avoiding Centric/C-Tek brand seals. More Chinese junk.
Speaking of Chinese junk, I also got my combo u-joints. They are Precision brand, same as what O'Reilly's carries, but I got them for half price. Turns out one of them had nicks on two journals that made it spin rough. Not worth sending it back, so I polished them out. Also....the joints have "USA" cast into the spider, but say "made in China" on the box.
I also replaced the pinion seal in the MII 8" rear (edit 8/20/2014: using a good Timken seal). Hopefully I got preload back in the right ballpark...
My driving desire to do everything the right way with this car forced me to buy a little 0-60in/lb beam torque wrench specifically to check the pinion preload. At least I can use it on my bicycles too. It says the preload is still way below spec for used bearings, so I
don't have to replace the crush sleeve after all, just keep tightening and checking until it's right.
Conclusion: reassembling the pinion nose/yoke/nut in original alignment without checking preload is lazy and unreliable.
My hokey seven-color Harbor Freight boost gauge came in yesterday. I only got it because the reviews are good and I thought having red/green/white backlight options would be handy. Problem is that the needle is red and the red LED setting makes it disappear. OTOH, the blue and aqua options make it fluoresce like a blacklight would. It's also
extremely bright, so I'll have to figure something out to dim it.
As an FYI, this gauge requires a constant +12v power supply if you want it to remember an LED color setting other than the default green. It latches the setting when the selector button is pushed and killing power resets it. I'll check the standby current draw when I can and report back.