I am starting the process of installing my crawler gears from Matt. The tranny is out, the t-case housing is off. I have removed the snap ring on the end of the input shaft to the t-case and removed the bearing. I have also straghtened out the staked portion of the staked nut in the center of the clutch assembly.

I am stumped as to how to get that humungeous nut off. First, it takes a huge wrench, which I have something that will work. Second, I can't figure a way to hold the shaft or some other part so that I can turn the nut.

Sears is your friend! one of their 3/4" drive SAE standard sockets is just deep enough to get in there and grab that nut. use an impact and you won't have to worry too much about holding the configuration from spinning.

-Rob

EDIT: 1-5/8" is the size you're after.

I just came back in the house to say "never mind". I got an 1 5/8 socket at Auto Zone and used my pneumatics. Auto Zone was about 1/3 the price of Craftsman, and its not like I am going to use it a lot.

Next question. What type of 2 jaw puller did people use to remove the t-case input shaft assembly? The auto parts store variety won't cut it.

well, on the tear down, I go ahead and pop out all the roll pins from all the shift linkages, slide the shift rails out from all the shift blocks and forks totally disassembling all the linkage... then the shift fork & collar will come away from the hi-lo assembly. At that point, you can use any standard 2 or 3 jaw puller to remove the hi-lo hub without interference from the fork.

now, things are a little different once the Tera's are in place as this doesn't work anymore... because of Tera's replacement shift rail where you can't seperate the shift block from the rail anymore. So, if you mess up and have to remove the hi-lo assembly once you've started the install, then you have to get creative in modifying one of your pullers... I like harbor freight for this because I can by a 2 jaw puller cheap, hack it up to suit my purpose and not feel bad about it.

-Rob

Rob's technique sounds pretty good to me. I did about everything the hard way when I did mine...

I didn't have any luck pulling the whole hi/lo assembly at once, we pulled it piece by piece. Possibly with a "modified" puller it could have worked, but my puller was not considered expendable...

I used a 6" Ampro puller to pull the high low all at once.

It has worked fine everytime I've done an install.

Joe