So I pulled my transfer case a couple of days ago and got around to cleaning it up for a good inspection before doing the SYE.
I found cracks. Lots of them. Most are quite shallow, and possibly could be "normal" (from all I have read). However, I have at least one long one that looks pretty scary to me. It almost looks like the internals came apart and deformed the case from inside. The small ones are all over and spidery-looking.
To me, it looked like when I scrubbed the case clean that there was something gray covering up all these cracks; it looked intentional, like a repair, not just grease or filth. Perhaps JB Weld?
I will open it up in a few minutes when I head outside to work on the TJ. At that time I will try to pull the planetary box and look at the inside of that part of the case half. If I see gobs of stuff covering up cracks it is going into the trash bin after I harvest all the parts!
I have located a possible replacement from an SE (21 splines, yes) and would be fine with pulling my T case's guts and putting them into the SE case so that it is 23 spline and installing all the new stuff (SYE, Tera2Lo) at that point.
I would much rather NOT have to buy a replacement 231, of course, but will happily buy this one I found if I have to. I do not want to have to worry about this all the time when driving this TJ.
Anyway, here are some photos. As I said, most are shallow, hairline spidery cracks, but one looks pretty bad to me. As far as I can tell there is zero fluid leakage.
Thanks!
I found cracks. Lots of them. Most are quite shallow, and possibly could be "normal" (from all I have read). However, I have at least one long one that looks pretty scary to me. It almost looks like the internals came apart and deformed the case from inside. The small ones are all over and spidery-looking.
To me, it looked like when I scrubbed the case clean that there was something gray covering up all these cracks; it looked intentional, like a repair, not just grease or filth. Perhaps JB Weld?
I will open it up in a few minutes when I head outside to work on the TJ. At that time I will try to pull the planetary box and look at the inside of that part of the case half. If I see gobs of stuff covering up cracks it is going into the trash bin after I harvest all the parts!
I have located a possible replacement from an SE (21 splines, yes) and would be fine with pulling my T case's guts and putting them into the SE case so that it is 23 spline and installing all the new stuff (SYE, Tera2Lo) at that point.
I would much rather NOT have to buy a replacement 231, of course, but will happily buy this one I found if I have to. I do not want to have to worry about this all the time when driving this TJ.
Anyway, here are some photos. As I said, most are shallow, hairline spidery cracks, but one looks pretty bad to me. As far as I can tell there is zero fluid leakage.
Thanks!