ARB air locker

So in the vein that can often habit with unsupervised access to a mobile phone and few beers. Drunk me has bought sober me a present from eBay. 
It’s an unused ARB air locker and compressor. 
It’ll be going in the back of the SJ. 

Superficially it doesn’t look that tricky. Guess the only thing is shimming and setting preloads. Is this a home install? Or a recipe for disaster?

wrote:

Superficially it doesn’t look that tricky. Guess the only thing is shimming and setting preloads. Is this a home install? Or a recipe for disaster?

More the latter than the former, but, it's really dependent on your experience & skill level.

How old is the third member you're installing it into, old enough that you would want to change the bearings whilst you have it apart?  If the answer to that is yes, then the typical home workshop/shed is not likely to be up to scratch.  New pinion bearings means a new crush sleeve (unless you choose to go with a solid spacer & shims) and that takes quite a bit of effort to crush.

If you're just planning to slap the locker in and re-use everything else, a home install in a well equipped home workshop is possible, you can probably pay someone to press the bearings off & on, you'll need to drill & tap the carrier for the air line and also a dial gauge with a magnetic mount and gear marking compound to set the backlash and get a good gear pattern,

Think this through carefully, it's not difficult, but you really only have one chance to set the gears up correctly, if you get it wrong, by the time you know it's wrong, the damage will have been done and you'll need to replace the ring & pinion.

As long as you do not play with the pinion then the set up is straight forward. There is no need to play with the pinion in a normal install unless you change the pinion bearing

The setting up then is all about backlash and you need a sensitive dial gauge. I had to buy two as I realised the "tolerance" declared on the specification of first one was greater than the back lash I was trying to measure.

I also had to play around a lot with mounting the dial gauge as finding a fixture without in built wobble was hard

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I confirm what Martin has said, as long as you do not disturb the pinion, you will not disturb the meshing between pinion and crown wheel. I have fitted two ARB air lockers and the most fiddly part was bending the copper air pipe so that it did not touch the crown wheel. As in all gear parts, cleanliness is vital.

Roger

Oh I do relate to the buying circumstances..

I too Confirm it is no problem to do. Even did this once to my SJ with a luncbox locker only by feel, and it got just as good/bad as on my jimny done with a dial gauge. Must recommend using a dial gauge and a torque wrench for this job though.
And loctite for the bolts inside the diff as well.
While you are at it I would rather check rear wheel bearings than the diff or pinion bearings, as the wheel bearings are way more likely to fail on a SJ than any other bearing maybe apart from the king pin bearings.

I took the time to make a Jig for the diff bolted to my work bench from some pieces of wood. Saved some fiddling time in the end.

Here I am doing a Jimny locker