It all went well, a fairly simple job.
I have now added a few pictures, unfortunately they were not taken during the work, but should give a reasonable impression.
I put the car up on ramps.
I dropped the exhaust, (it might be possible without doing that but it gave a lot more room to maneuver) in my case this was not too bad as I have a joint in the middle of the exhaust, so I could undo this and take the rear box and half the main pipe away,
if you have to try and undo the normal exhaust joints you may have bigger problems I know mine are too rusty.
I drained the oil, ( I just thought it was easier while in still in the car)
You have good access to the nuts on the two drive shafts, so I removed them.
For the prop shaft you have to jack one wheel slightly off the ramp so that you can rotate the prop shaft to gain access to all the bolts.
The worst job is the two front mounting bolts (the two bolts that you can see in the above photo either side of the Universal Joint), unfortunately you cannot get a socket onto them, so ideally you need a long 17mm spanner,I had a real problem getting them started, and needed to tap the spanner with a lump hammer (unfortunately the rubber mounting takes some of the power) once they were moving it was not too bad but a little fiddly (a ratchet spanner would be ideal), The front end of the diff will drop down a few cm onto a small cross member.
Next is to loosen the two bolts for the rear diff mount from the cross member.
If the drive/prop shafts are not free yet, you may need to encourage them with a cold chisel, just a tap on the joint was all that was needed for me, there is enough movement to decouple the drive shafts from the studs.
This is where you need two people (or a good trolley jack)
Support the diff and remove the rear mount bolts then lower the diff to the ground.
You then need to remove the rear mounting bracket by removing the two bolts holding it to the diff and install it on the replacement.
Fitting is the reverse.
Unfortunately it didn't get rid of all the noise I am experiencing, I put it down to the diff after discovering lots of metallic sludge and filings on the drain plug, so either this one is a bit noisy as well (it was second hand) or something else is causing the noise.
One interesting fact, the date on the diff I took out was dated October 2006, the car is a 2005 so the diff must have been changed within the first year.
Dave
