Things went together easy enough when I remembered to include things like the vss drive gear and shaft :P After cleaning the case halves to remove all the aluminum dust I dropped the driven shaft in to do the shim measurement. You put it in without shims first and use the subarugears tool to find out how many shims to add.
The pinion depth shims are cheap so I ordered a bunch in different thicknesses ahead of time to have them on hand since every dealership I talked to didn't keep any in stock.
Next I turned to the bearing races and seals for the differential. Just mark then loosen the adjustment cups on either side, the bearing will probably fall out while you are doing this. Replace the o-ring and the axle seal, make sure that the seals are the the "wrong" side. Left goes on the right and vise versa, that way the oil grooves are in the correct orientation for the reversed R&P.
Quick note about the differential. I got an OBX LSD and replaced the washers and bolts "just in case". Before i put the ring gear on, I tested the output shafts and they were too tight to go on. I used a dremel to run the grooves on the diff splines until I could get the output shafts on. This is fairly common with OBX diffs it seems, when I tried the output shafts on the stock diff they slip on nice and easy.
Time to put it all mostly together. Put the case halves together and tighten it all up, but leave the nose cone/center diff housing off. Those differential bearing cups need to be adjusted now and rather than go through the pics (which I was too busy to take :P ) you can watch the subarugears video which was hugely helpful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSWPKmA09ng
Once I did that, I took it all apart, greased up the ring gear and put it all back together again to check the pattern. You don't have to do this but I was really curious, and it came out fine.
Let's talk about RTV. Let's talk about you and me. Let's talk about all the good things but mostly bad things that you see. Let's talk about sealant. Let's talk about sealant...
Just a little line and spread it out with your finger, it should be a very thin coating meant to fill gaps. I'm tired of seeing half a tube of liquid gasket, RTV, or permabond used to seal surfaces.
I got all excited and forgot to get a good shot before the nose cone and axle stubs went on so BAM! built transmission ready for install. I did the common trans fluid mix of 1qt. motul 75w90 and 3 qt. redline shockproof synthetic gear oil, which gets great reviews on nasioc.
