Last weekend I did a oil change on my differential. I used one of those suction guns (kinda looks like a big syringe with a hose attached) and sucked out about 0.5L of dark, matalic silver sludge. So much for sealed for life. For the newer members, you raise the car up on a hoist and then you will see a bolt which requires a socket driver to be attached, open this. Dont worry nothing will spill out as this is a filling hole and not a draining hole, insert the sucking device and suck it all out.

I filled it in the same way using the suction device and put back 1.5L of Royal purple synthetic 70w-140. This cost me about $20 a quart. I am sure you can find it much cheaper as I bought it from some private local performance improvement shop because I was in a hurry. After the oil change the noise I was hearing was gone. I would have taken pictures but I didnt want to to get my new blackberry dirty.

 

Ohh yeah.. while I had the car up I also greased my prop shaft as per Dennis's FAQ post. I cleaned all around and tried looking for those notches but I think my 02 2.5 does not have those notches. So I stuck the grease needle in any where I could and injected grease everywhere and I even noticed some spill over on the other side of the bearing. You should ensure that you do this with a manual grease gun, notone hooked up to a compressoror you will break your needle for sure (as I did) Then in the end I smeared it all with my finger. After I took it for a spin and the noise was gone.

But...

THe next day driving to work was great (car sleeps in my garage) no noise but after work when I got in and started driving again the noise was back but it was greatly reduced. So if you have the noise already maybe you would like to try this first, if you dont have the noise then you should definitley try this as to prevent failure in the future.

 

nice write up...good info