Dissasembling the E250F & E53 Transaxles #2

Main Case Dissasembly

Here are a couple pics disassembling the central transmission.  

Since all of toyota's transaxles are all pretty much the same, you can use the S51, E250F, E53 or E153 or other similar workshop manuals to help dismantle everything.  The Rav4's E250F manual was pretty hopeless, having short explanations for what to do, and hard to follow part/bolt names.  I ended up using the S51 manual for all of the torque specs as I was just guessing what bolt was what from the Rav's manual.  All of the torque settings are the same between these transaxles.

Differentials

Left is a pic of the Camry & right is the Rav Diff.

The Camry has a separate row of bolts on the inside to hold the diff internally together, but the rav only has the bolts around the ring gear.  This means that when you undo the bolts on the ring gear, the whole diff comes apart...  Shown below.

You can see in these pics that there are indeed 2 diffs inside one enclosure.  It's a very clever setup for such a small differential.  The left is with the ring gear still attached & right is after I've pressed it off.  You will need an actual press to get the ring gear off as it's held on quite tight.  You can keep the diff together by installing service bolts, there's 4 positions behind the ring gear near the nylon speedo gear where you can put these.

Here are the ring gears compared...  the teeth on the smaller E53 trans are beefier & fewer, and diameter is less by about 10mm which you'd expect going from 4.9:1 to 3.6:1.

Here is the ring gear installed on the AWD Rav Diff.  The Manual suggests boiling the ring gear in water to fit it on which is what I did, but only got the water up to about 80deg C & the gear dropped straight on.  I was told to run an oxy over the ring gear before reading the manual, but boiling some water & dropping the ring gear in seemed to me to be the better option.

Now we need to remove the taper bearings from both the diff & trans cases of both, and swap them over.  This is because you should always keep the bearing sets together.  I'd suggest at this point that it'd be a good idea to get a new set of bearings, however I kept the same ones because I couldn't figure out how to press the bearings off of the rav diff.  You'll need to remove the outer oil seal, then remove the oil baffle (the blue thing) before you can press the bearing halves out.  Pressing the bearings out is a very tricky procedure, and you'll need the right tools (75mm bearing puller - which you will need back at the start to pull the 5th gear anyway).  I swapped the oil baffle from the E250F to the E53, and you will need to use a E250F oil seal to fit the Rav CV shafts as the camry has different size.  Since the cases are physically the same, the oil seal fits perfect.

Posted by ST: 10th May 2013