Lexmex

Most of my Saturdays are filled with helping my uncle out, watching college football or working on the RX300, or a mix of all of that.

Yesterday, I took care of several pending things so we will take a look at them all in one thread. It is a mix of a little maintenance, replacing an exhaust joint and doing a small modification to the intake.

My day started out bright and early with a trip to get some gear fluid. True, I use Royal Purple, but the only way it comes is in a case down here, which is over $100 USD, and I have no need for that. So, I took a trip to Mercedes and BMW as depending on the dealership, they stock a good amount of generic brand name along with aftermarket fluids. Mercedes didn't have any in stock, but BMW had the same 75W140 synthetic fluid that I have used before so I ended up getting that.

My reason for playing around with the gear fluid was too top off as recently I had a leak around the transfer that I also corrected using a little of the higher weight gear fluid.

After that, I took a trip over to Home Depot to buy some plastic PVC pieces, some circular metal clamps (will show why) and some glue and paint for the intake.

Then it was off to my friends at Hangar 1 exhaust shop in south central Mexico City, so that is where we start our pictorial journey.

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First order of business after getting the RX up on the lift was to work on adding fluid to the transfer case. For that we required the services of a 6 inch extension wrench shown here.

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Then to remove said transfer case fill bolt.

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Bolt is removed.

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And here is the fluid.

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Rear shot of the bottle, note the 75W140 designation. Now, this is heavier than you want to use. a W90 is really about as high as you want to get, but the W140 is heavy enough to help seal the leak, too, which is why I used it in the first place.

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Basically, we just attached a hose and a bottle, but the picture I tried to upload didn't seem to want to work. I had to add about .100 to .150 ml of fluid. So I will move on to my next maintenance item, and this is and important thing to note.

A few weeks back I noted that I had to remove the axle (drive shaft) on my passenger front side due to a torn boot. I noticed this torn boot after checking for looseness in the outboard joint shaft. There was looseness and we fixed this just by removing it fixing the boot and repositioning the drive shaft back into the transfer case. However, we forgot to attach 2 of the 4 clamps to 2 of the boots, so that is what I did with some I got at Home Depot.

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And then on the one closer to the transfer case. I eventually broke off the excess part of the clamp just by pushing the excess back and forth with my fingers.

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The piece pointed at in blue on the outboard joint shaft is the one you have to shake to see if there is any play. I wouldn't recommend trying to remove this piece yourself. We had the tools to be able to pull this entire shaft out and reposition it along with fixing the torn boot, but it is not a piece of cake. I liken it a bit to replacing shocks, though much more is involved. You will note the transfer case on the left and the oil pan on the bottom.

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I thought I'd take this shot for future reference.

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Now, you may recall this thread I recently talked about, https://www.clublexus.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=310922

Well, it was time to get rid of that piece.

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Another shot of the opening fireworks.

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A rear shot.

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Now in the previous picture, you may have noticed some white material between the two joints. That was put there by Hangar 1 about a bit ago in order lessen the popping sound between the two pieces. A temporary stopgap so to speak and you can see it a little better here.

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Here is the piece from the side after being cut off. I can't begin to tell you what great satisfaction this gave me. Almost as much as when those other joint pieces were cut off a year ago when I did enlarged exhaust piping up front.