Ford Performance Rear Diff cover

[350Industrial]

Lube locker gasket as well- works perfectly

 

[Coop65]

If I had it to do over, I would have never messed with the cover swap..... Not the fault of the cover, but of the dang piece of crap bolts it is held on with--- snapped off 3 of the 12 heads while trying to break loose (even after soaking with PB Blaster to fight the rust)--- mind you I'm sitting at about 117K mileage so the bolts had been exposed / rusted as time has mounted on that mileage. But crap what a headache... I was not able to get any of the 3 out either by trying to drill/easy out... did not have any welder to try the welded nut on the broken bolt shank trick so I was in a fix. I decided to try the cover anyway- installed a lubelocker gasket, new ford performance cover, and broke a 4th bolt trying to gently reuse the old bolts to install (down to 9 at that point then broke the 4th)--- so as my luck would be, now I had 3 of the bolts AT THE BOTTOM OF THE COVER broken off.... I had now 8 total bolts torqued to about 20 ft lbs (scared to torque them any further because I'm sure they would fail) holding the cover... I did get 2 more bolts to 30 ft lbs but again had 3 bolts in a row at the very bottom of the cover broken- I applied an exterior bead of Ford RTV sealant (TA-31 I think is the number) around the bottom seam and about halfway up each side. Ran it this way for about a month without a single drop of a leak .... I worked on seeing if I could do anything with those 3 broken bolts again this past weekend and was able to get one out so I replaced it with some new bolts I had to order online- so back down to 3 broken now. Finally gave up on being able to get the other 2 on the bottom out, so I strategically drilled a bolt hole through the cover and housing all the way through in between the 2 broken ones and installed a proper length bolt all the way through (bolt & nyloc nut). Everything is holding great now and I'm sure it will be fine the way I have resolved it but man if I had known it was going to lead to all that work and hassle I'd have never changed the cover !! Oh well that's how maintenance goes sometime LOL....