ZUK - ELECTRICAL MELTDOWN

Last time in Renfrew I was airing up and the Zuki just shut off with an electrical issue. 

Today I found the source....an overloaded blade extender. I didn't see the melted goop underneath the connector until I was troubleshooting a single dim headlight issue (which is always the headlight fuse not seating correctly).

All the extender had on it was my CB and it didn't pop the fuse. I did transmit a few times during the day it died, but I don't think a 4W transmit would take that much current overall, even with the overhead of running the rest of the radios electronics. But still my bad for over rating the extender with a 15A fuse.

So, those crappy extenders are GONE and I added a relay-switched accessory fuse box. Moved all of my accessories to it and had a general wiring tidy up....more tidying to come.

 

REAR AXLE FAILURE

The rear gears in the Zuk axle suffered a catastrophic ring and pinion failure. Due to some significant chipping on the edge of the pinion and a warped ring gear or carrier. My guess is a chip came off the pinion, which chewed up the ring and pinion and the rest is history.

Luckily I have parts, so I stripped out the aluminum 3rd member out of the front of a spare axle. Swapped out the 22 spline front side gears for 26 spline rear side rears. Welded up the spider gears to 'Fozi Lock' the rear - there no way I'm running open differentials ;)

I decided to 'Fozi Lock' it (weld 2 spider gear teeth, miss 2 teeth, and so on) as apposed to 'Lincoln Lock' (fully weld the gears). Pros and cons of both methods here;

http://www.offroaders.com/tech/Lincoln-Lockers-Fozzy-Locker.htm

I started to button up the 3rd and torqued down the cap bolts...and boom! I threaded a cap bolt in the aluminum housing. I was using service manual torque specs, so it should have been fine. The housing is ruined, so everything got swapped into the Samurai steel housing after all! It'll be stronger like that ;-)

I got it all installed back into the axle housing, RTV sealant and all. I was cleaning up the workbench....the cross pin cap was lying there, taunting me. So it all had to come out again in order to install that.

3rd is in now for the final time. I also took the opportunity to install 3 new Maruti Gypsy (Indian Suzuki SJ410 LWB) transfer case mounts to replace the hockey pucks.

Test drive is good so far, and it's much much quieter with no warped ring gear and proper transfer case mounts :-)

\\