Surprise!!!

The next step was supposed to be working on those main drive sprockets. However, I decided I was sick of walking around, bumping into and being annoyed by the seat being in the way. I knew if I wanted to check on the transmission/differential case I need to take the seat off first, because it is bolted to the rear inspection cover. You may remember from an earlier post the trans/diff case yielded 1.5 gallons of water when I pulled the drain plugs.

So with the seat off I pulled the 10 bolts and removed the rear trans/diff inspection cover. And, SURPRISE!!! I had noticed the large beads of weld on top of the trans/diff case when I bought the crawler. However, I thought two things. Maybe the welds were part of a seat modification. The seat on it now is not the original. The original seat mounted to the top of the trans/diff case. And/or there were some cracks and these were welds meant to fix the cracks.

I could have never predicted the carnage that was hiding behind the cover. The pictures show two threaded bolt holes that are totally blown out and the other picture is an up and under shot that shows an absolute jigsaw puzzle. Ugh.

I posted this experience on http://www.cletrac.org/ and I had a couple of guys offer to sell me a new trans/diff case for rather high prices and the shipping from their locations (the other side of the US) would have been outrageous.

A week or so later a retired sheriff from a town about 45 minutes away asked me to give a call. He had a trans/diff case. Mike is a real nice guy that has been restoring his OC-3 for two years. He has a HG (the earlier near identical predecessor of the OC-3) that he bought for parts. He's taken about all the parts he needs. He offered me the trans/diff case for a real good price and he has quite a few other parts to offer. I haven't been over to see Mike yet - life has been real busy but he will be getting a visit soon.

I'll probably buy the trans/diff case and put it on the shelf. I'm not too excited about taking the differential gears out and rebuilding it all again in a new case. I'm thinking about using a bunch of JB Weld to build up the threaded holes and "letting her buck" (a term we used often at Green Giant).

In conclusion I still look at all of the damage and cannot figure out how or why the damage occurred. A mystery that will probably never be solved?