Axle breather was missing

Puttering around with the truck today and figures I would put on my rear axle breather relocation kit. Crawled underneath and couldn’t find the breather. WTF? Looked where it should be and there is an oily and dirty hole. I cleaned it up really good and installed the kit.

I just changed the fluid a week ago and it was pretty clean. Makes me wonder if someone took it off when changing the gear fluid recently and forgot to reinstall it.

 

I was going to tell you to change your fluid immediately but saw that it was just recently done. Did your kit come with a new breather?

I relocated my stock breather up behind the tail light. Bought the adapter that screws into the axle housing and accepts a rubber hose.

 

Yes, the kit was from Yota Tech and has a breather on it. I put it in the drivers side taillight pocket, as I was putting some wire loom on my topper wiring to keep it from chafing and shorting out on me.

I used some gear oil on the fitting and ran it in and out a few times to loosen the grime and allow it to seat properly. I’ll probably change the axle fluid out soon just for the hell of it.

 

Yeah I’m a little OCD like that too. Can’t hurt to do it again, other than your wallet. I can only assume whoever did it, took it out to clean it and didn’t bother putting it back. Or they had a relocation kit on it and removed before you got the truck?

 

I’m guessing the former as I doubt this pickup has ever been off road. $30 in gear fluid and a couple of beers......

 

Changing the rear differential fluid is probably the easiest fluid change on the truck for sure. Definitely easier than changing the oil.

 

Agreed. I’ll be under there soon anyway when I’m replacing all the shocks and adding shackles.

So far on this truck I’ve replaced front diff, transfer case, rear diff, and transmission fluids, cleaned the throttle body and added the breather mod. Trying to convince myself to do plugs next year, as the truck just broke 85k.

 

I’ve done all those services as well. The only one of those I’m hesitant to do is the transmission. I’ve done all the others and way more complicated jobs on other vehicles. But for some reason I’m really hesitant to touch the transmission fluid on this truck. I’ve seen write ups etc. but I’m still gonna shy about it. The truck only has 32K on it. I wish it was more simplified like taking out a drain plug and filling it back up and checking it on the dipstick. That’s how I’ve always done it. I just don’t want my perfectly driving and shifting transmission into a $6000 brick. I tried to have the dealer just do a simple pan drop. And he said he didn’t want to take my money and to leave it alone.
Well shit, I’m not gonna force him. I do all my own maintenance. One thing I’ve never liked was transmissions, even though I’ve installed a few turbo 350s in my day.

I had a really good transmission guy who I would take my vehicles for service. He’s built me a really nice transmission in the past for an old car with reasonable prices. He was an old hot rodder. Then he retired. Hard to find any good shops don’t act like used car salesman.