It turns out that I had way more motivation than I thought the other night! Not only did I get the pan drilled, but I swapped the pans, got the steel-braided hose cut and built, tightened everything up, and filled it with oil. A quick test drive showed a small leak from the blank plug on the oil filter sandwich adapter, but after torquing that down real well, I don’t see any leaks.
I was getting a leak from the left side, coming off the bottom of the transaxle, but I couldn’t really tell what it was. I didn’t do anything about it immediately because I knew that the axle was bad and needed to be replaced — during the trans swap, I tore the boot and despite sealing it up with some silicone, I think the 860 mile trip through the rain got plenty of junk in and all the grease out. No big deal, though: I went ahead and exchanged the busted axle at O’Reilly and swapped it out tonight. Took me just under an hour, but that included trying to find my stupid tire iron (left it in the van) and boogering up an axle seal. I think the original axle seal was damaged when I put it in after the OBX went in and the leak on the left side was Synchromesh. Upon swapping out the seal, I managed to bend up the first one I put in, so I pulled it out and put my last spare in — I think this one went in okay.
I also found that I had to swap out the c-clip with the one that I had rounded off in order to get the axle to seat. One of my big worries with doing that originally was that I wouldn’t be able to remove the axle at all, but I was fortunate in that it took some effort, but nothing extraordinary to remove the bad axle from the diff.
Next up, I need to get it out and give it some test driving, but I’d rather do that in daylight. Should be good to go for the first RallyCross of the WOR season this coming weekend, though!