Thread: Another way to get oil into a diff without making a mess

Now I know there are other ways to do this - but when I compared the size of the diff plug and the standard soft drink bottle neck, I came up with this.

Proviso 1: Practise with an empty soft drink bottle first. The thread of the diff isn't a match, but a few turns will lock the bottle into the diff.

Proviso 2: Squeeze gently. Oil softens PET (itself oil based) bottles. And you are squeezing a bottle not exactly designed for such things.

When the bottle is mostly empty, you can gently rotate it up in front of the panhard rod and it will drain out of it's own accord.

You can either do it with a 1.5L bottle and judge 200ml for the 2nd shot, or 3x600ml bottles not quite filled to the top.

And, although I haven't got a picture of it, using a dismembered pop-top on a 600ml bottle works reasonably well when refilling the R380.

(Note: I've gone over to Castrol VMX-M 75w/80 instead of ATF, and it works very well - very smooth and almost cures the 1st -2nd syncro problem)

For Mr Wortho - the last time I cleaned the mud off, I noticed that the diff pan and axle tube ( along with most of the exposed bits of the chassis) had a lot of stone chips - so much that it was almost bare metal. So I hit it with some alkali based detergent degreaser, a session with a powerwasher and a can of Killrust matt black. I don't expect it to last like the original OEM coating, but it does the job.