How to Service, Rebuild, and Maintain 6″ GDP Portals

Length: 16:00
Created: February 19, 2020

Transcript

Are you running GDP portals? Ever wondered how to change a seal or how to change a bearing? Well, today we’re gonna show you how to do it all, so let’s get started.

So we’ve got our 6″ portal here on the table with a few basic hand tools. First thing we’re gonna do is go ahead and remove these two Allens. We’re gonna remove this bolt completely, and then we’re gonna leave about three threads on each of these two bolts here.

Like I said, you just wanna make sure that you have at least three threads—one, two, three. That’s plenty enough there. So we’re gonna grab ahold of the output shaft, take the box up off the table, then take a rubber mallet and hit each of these bolts on the head until it separates the box.

Go ahead and remove these bolts completely and set them aside. Then you can grab two pry bars, two screwdrivers, anything like that. It’s going to go right up underneath. Just pry up, kinda work your way around until it completely separates the box. Take your old gasket and lay it aside—we’re not gonna be re-using it.

So we have our lid side and the housing side. Go ahead and pull all of the gears out. Just set them aside. Sometimes this gear right here will get stuck. What you can do is take your finger, stick it inside, hold the housing up off the table just a little bit, give it a few whacks, and it’ll come right out.

Same with this gear—sometimes it will get stuck. Try to wiggle it out of there. If it’s not gonna come out, grab ahold of the gear… [whacks the housing with a rubber mallet]

So now that all of the gears are removed, we’re gonna head over to the press and we’re gonna press our output shaft out. You just wanna lay it up here in your press, you wanna make sure it’s good and flat. Make sure you know it’s not gonna slip out of the way once you go to pressing on it or anything like that. We’ve got it where it’s in a good location. Then throw some safety glasses on here. I’m just gonna start pressing this output shaft down and out, so it comes out just like that.

The next step is gonna be to remove the bearings from the housing, as well as the lid of the portal box. There’s a few different way to do it. You can get a blind bearing removal tool, which will go right inside the bearing and then pull the bearing out.

But today we’re gonna be showing you how to remove them by heating the box up. We’re gonna do this—I’m making sure whenever we’re heating the portal box with the lid that we work the heat in a circle form, just like this. And we’re gonna continue to do that until we get it hot enough to where the bearings will get knocked out.

You just wanna make sure that you heat around the bearing and not directly down on top of the bearing.

Once we got it good and hot, we’re gonna grab ahold of the portal and then just slam straight down. Now the idler gear bearing fell out—we’re gonna get the other two bearings out.

Then once we’ve heated on it pretty good, we’re just gonna grab the sides again, slam it right out. Looks like our thrust bearing came out as well. Sometimes, once you get that aluminum hot enough and you slam it down, all the bearings will come out at once.

So now we’re gonna head over to the housing side of the portal and we’re gonna set this aside and let it cool down.

So we’re gonna start with this center bearing. Go ahead and remove your dowel pins as well. Sometimes they’ll just pop right out. If they don’t, there’s a through hole here—you can just take a small punch and punch it right out. We’re gonna go ahead and remove the idler gear bearing, right here in the center. I’m just gonna grab ahold of the housing. Looks like our top bearing came out, let’s see if we can get this middle bearing out.

Looks like our other bearing… The last one in there is the center, the idler gear bearing. We’re gonna have to heat it up just a little bit more here. There we go—all three of our bearings are out of the housing.

Now we’re gonna head on over to the press. So we’ve let both halves of our box cool down. We’re gonna be pressing our bearings into the lid side, so we’re gonna go ahead and sit the lower portion of the housing, or the big side of the housing, aside.

We’re gonna grab a thrust bearing, a double-sealed bearing, and then our idler gear bearing. On the idler gear bearing, you just wanna make sure whenever you go to install it, you take the inner race out. It looks just like this.

We’re gonna head over here to the press. We’re gonna take our idler gear bearing. We’re gonna slide it right into position. Get it as straight as you possibly can. If you run out of stroke, which it looks like we’re going to, you can just get a big socket, just get it to where it’s laying on the outer portion of the bearing. Then just go ahead and press it in.

Looks like we got this bearing fully seated. Go ahead and set our socket aside. We’re gonna rotate the box around and we’re gonna grab our thrush bearing and install lit right here. The thrush bearing will be the biggest one that’s gonna come in the rebuild kit. Again, we just wanna make sure we get it as centered as we possibly can before we start pressing on it.

We’ve got it pretty good and centered. Gonna go ahead and put the press down. Looks like we’re gonna run out of stroke on this one. We’re gonna go ahead and grab our socket again. And on this one you wanna make sure you go on the inner race only. If you go to the outer race, you could potentially damage the bearing. You could potentially blow the housing out—it’s gonna put too much side load and too much pressure on the case.

So this socket fits just about perfectly in the center of the race. We’re gonna go ahead and press it in.

You want to run this press down until you can kinda hear that it’s, you know, getting in a bind, it’s starting to get tight. And this bearing should be sitting just like this. It’s not gonna fully seat down in the hole, just like this bearing, and this bearing won’t either. So just that little lip hanging out is perfectly fine.

Gonna go ahead and let the tension off of our press. We’re gonna press in the double-sealed bearing, which is gonna go right here. So we’re gonna go ahead and take our double-sealed bearing, get it laid into place right here at the top of the portal box. Make sure we get it as straight as possible, just like any of the bearings we’re gonna be pressing in. We’re gonna get our socket in place and we’re gonna go ahead and start pressing it down.

Again, you see there’s just gonna be a little lip here. We waited until our press was starting to bind up a little bit and we know it’s fully seated. We’re gonna go ahead and set it aside.

So whenever we pressed our output shaft out of our lid, our thrust bearing stayed on, which is super common. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we need to press the output shaft off the bearing, so we’re gonna take this right here.

So we have our press set up to press this bearing off. We’re just gonna take a socket and set it on top here, that way we’re pushing at the very top. We don’t want to get to the spines at all. I’m gonna get this as centered as possible and we’re gonna go ahead and press the bearing off of the shaft.

There we go—we got our bearing off of our shaft. We’re gonna grab our output shaft and we’re gonna slide it through so that the side with the threads on it is facing down and this spline side is facing up. We’re gonna get it lined up, make sure we got it in a good position here to press this shaft it.

We’re gonna use a long 29mm socket and sit it just like this. We’re gonna make sure we get the shaft as straight as we possibly can. Once we have everything lined up we’re gonna go ahead and press this shaft in. Alright, and this is when you’re gonna know it’s fully seated—when the splines are laying down on the top of the race, just like this.

And now our lid is done, minus installing the seals.

So we’re gonna go ahead and lay the other side of the portal up here. We’re gonna grab our idler bearing. We already took the race out of it, just like we did on the lid, and we have two double-sealed bearings here. We’re gonna go ahead and lay them all into place. Get them all started straight, then we’re gonna start pressing them in. We’re gonna start with the idler again. So we’re gonna take our socket, get the bearing lined up, and we’re gonna go ahead and start pressing it.

There you go—that one’s fully seated. Now we’re gonna move over here to one of our double–sealed bearings and press it right in as well. It’s good and seated. We’re gonna press our last one in here… There we go! All of our bearings are good and seated, as you can see. They will have just a little bit of of a lip hanging up out of the box there.

Now we’re done with the press. Gonna come back over here and we’re gonna start reassembling this box.

First thing we’re gonna do, we’re gonna take our drive gear. And on this one you wanna make sure that this side that has a bevel is going towards the inside of the box. So it should be sticking straight up. Gonna get it lined up just like that. Once we have it started down in there we’re just gonna take our hammer and knock it straight in until it fully seats. Then just spin it and make sure the bearing’s spinning good.

Now we’re gonna take our idler gear and we’re gonna install our race to one side, just like that. We’re gonna go ahead and get it lined up and it should just slide right down into place, just like that. You just wanna make sure that these gears are flush with each other.

Then we’re gonna take our driven gear, just lay it down in there just like that. Super simple. We’re gonna take our gasket. You’re gonna install it and guide right off the dowel pins, so it should just sit just like this.

Now we’re gonna take the race from the lid-side idler bearing and I’m just gonna knock it right down onto our idler gear here, just like that, so it’s fully seated. Then we’re gonna grab our lid, get it all lined up, just kind of go around and hit it with your hand just a little bit there. We’re gonna grab a rubber mallet, applying pressure on this side. You just wanna hit the box all the way around until it fully seats, all the way around.

Once it’s done that we’re gonna grab our seals. We’re gonna grab our 40mm seal and install it right here on the output shaft. A lot of times you can press it in pretty close by hand, then you’ll take a hammer and just kind of go through and tap it. Tap it down. You should be able to go around and feel it—it should be flush.

Then we’re gonna go ahead and start a couple of our bolts in the box here. It shouldn’t want to come apart. They press together pretty hard there, but just in case, we’re just gonna roll it over to the back side. We’re gonna install our seal here. Again, you just want to make sure that it’s flush all the way around, just like that.

And the last thing to do is to put your bolts back in. Make sure you torque them to the spec. On a six inch, these bolts are gonna be 60 ft/lb. You wanna torque them down. This bolt right here will be removed because that’s where your brake caliper mount is gonna go. Put these two lower bolts down here and torque to 60 ft/lb, and you want to make sure that you use the short Allen-headed screw out here and the longer one needs to go over here on this side. Tighten all of them down.

Add some oil, re-install it on your machine, and that’s how super easy it is to rebuild a GDP portal. For more information on our portals or any of SuperATV’s great products, feel free to give us a call at 855-743-3427, or check us out online at SuperATV.com. Thanks for watching, and have a great day.