![\"younder-man\"](\"https:\/\/giuliettas.files.wordpress.com\/2008\/07\/younder-man.png?resize=525%2C362\")
<\/p>\nHaving this blog to look back on is pretty neat – I get to revisit my younger self, see what I thought about stuff, and reflect on what’s changed. \u00a0Most people can probably relate to how it feels when they discover an old essay they wrote for school, or a set of pictures from some big event in their life – a very human mix of\u00a0nostalgia, slightly embarrassed introspection and my-god-where-has-the-time-gone reflection on changing priorities. \u00a0Anyway, I was doing some house keeping and found this post. \u00a0I think it is as useful now as it was then.<\/p>\n
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Me in a younger mans clothes – a few days before I wrote this post. \u00a0How’s the Sprint Veloce doing Corey?<\/strong><\/p>\n From July 30, 2008:<\/strong> \u00a0Cleaning up the differential housing was one of those jobs I resisted doing for a while.\u00a0 Every time I looked at it the 2 hours of scraping, solvent bathing and degreaser scrubbing I would have to do flashed before my eyes and I found something else to do.\u00a0 Last week I rearranged a lot of my stuff to fit the Berlina in my space and found myself once again faced with this greasy lump in a tray sitting on my bench top waiting for me to clean it.\u00a0 It was time to face the subject of so much procrastination.<\/p>\n The housing was covered in a thick coating of dirt that had bonded with oil and built up over the years.\u00a0 To save time and solvent I used a small scraper to remove the big stuff.\u00a0 By the time I was done I had removed probably\u00a0three pounds of the caked oily dirt.<\/p>\n Greasy oily goo scraped off easily, but there was so much of it that it took about an hour to get it ready for a solvent bath.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>While scraping I discovered a grease pencil marking on one of the fins near the collar that mounts the pinion gear to the drive shaft.\u00a0 Maybe this mark is how they knew what the ratio for the read end is.\u00a0 I cleaned off the same spot on my spare Veloce rear end and found a similar mark.\u00a0 When I open it up to clean it out I’ll see what the ratio for that rear end is\u00a0and see\u00a0if the marks mean anything.\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately I couldn’t think of a way to clean the rear end completely without removing the markings.<\/p>\n Grease pencil marking on the SS differential I am cleaning.\u00a0 If you look closely you can see there are two markings.<\/strong><\/p>\n This is the same spot on the Sprint Veloce rear end.\u00a0 Only one mark on this one.<\/strong><\/p>\n Ahhh.\u00a0 So clean.\u00a0 Once the scraping was done I used a little stale gasoline then scrubbed it with Purple Power degreaser.\u00a0 I wore gloves and eye protection and worked in a well ventilated space.\u00a0 You can’t leave the degreaser\u00a0on the aluminum long or it will etch it and if it gets on your hands for any length of time your skin will dry and flake off over the next few days.\u00a0 Yuck. \u00a0If it does this to you skin, one can only imagine what your body does with the chemicals it absorbs if you don’t wear gloves.<\/strong><\/p>\n I did my best to keep any grit out of the pinion bearings and didn’t clean out the inside parts until the outside was spotless.\u00a0 I rinsed the degreaser away with water then used air followed by a heat gun to chase all the water out of the bearings.\u00a0 I sprayed the bearings with WD (water displacer) 40 when everything was clean.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The other side.\u00a0 Very clean.\u00a0 Note “520” marking.<\/strong><\/p>\n Someone went through the trouble to stamp this number here.\u00a0 Perhaps a casting batch number?<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"sprint-speciale-differential-cleaning\"](\"http:\/\/giuliettas.files.wordpress.com\/2008\/07\/sprint-speciale-differential-cleaning.jpg\")
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