01
After we shed a little light on the situation, we found a
giant crack in the original differential carrier mounting
bracket. The bolts pulled through the bracket, allowing the rear-
end to rotate violently.
03
The bolts
that pass
through the side
of the differential
carrier mounting
bracket can only
be reached with a
box-end wrench.04
What
started
as a four-bolt
exchange got a lit-
tle more compli-
cated when we
realized there
wasn’t enough
room to remove
the differential
carrier mounting
bracket bolts. The
storage contain-
ers (part of the
floorpan) keep
them from
coming out.02
With the car resting securely on jackstands, we start by
loosening the front bolt on the differential carrier mount-
ing bracket. This typically requires a box-end wrench on the top
side to keep the bolt from spinning.if you’re working on a 1965-’79 Corvette),
it required dropping the centersection to
access the bolts that pass through the dif-
ferential. This complicated the process,
as the centersection isn’t easy to remove,
but we found a few tricks to speed up the
process. It helps that our car doesn’t have a
standard exhaust system all the way to the
back of the car, so we didn’t have to deal
with removing part of the exhaust in order
to lower the rearend. Either way, take a
look at how we repaired a weak link in the
C2 Corvette independent rear suspension
design by installing a new differential car-
rier mounting bracket. VETTE
05
In order to
access the bolts
we need to lower the
rearend. We start by
loosening (but not
removing) the differen-
tial crossmember bolts.
You may notice the
thick steel plate, in place
of the original bush-
ing, a crude repair per-
formed many years ago.
The semi-solid mount
still features a rubber
bushing sandwiched
between the cross-
member and frame.VETTEWEB.COM 47