Things starting to get serious now. I took the Ruckstell housing and put it into a portable vice. Here you can see the bell housing P159, with the internal ring gear P93, bronze plate/bearing assembly, and outer ring gear in place.As you may know, a Ruckstell uses a special hardened & tapered bolt setup, and it is not wise to reuse them. So, as you can see all of these bolts and washers are new. $50 bucks new.
First try, got it all bolted together and the axles would not turn. With the bronze plate not installed, everything turned fine. Rebolted everything, locked up tight.
Pulled it all apart, including knocking the P145 thrust plate off the pins again. What we found is that at the base of each pin, if you looked really carefully, there was still enough crust to not allow it to seat. The clearance between the steel and bronze plate is supposed to be no greater than 7 thou. It was off the base enough to make everything too tight. So, out came the Dremel again and we wire brushed the heck out of the pins. Reassembled it again, and now have approx 5 thou clearance between the bronze and steel plates. The assembly turns now. In this photo, we have something underneath the assembly so we can get our fingers under it. Once seated on the notch plate, you can spin it easily with a finger. I know the sliding gear should not be there in this step.
At this point, everything is tight but not torqued or wired.
As a reminder, here is what it looked like when it first was apart....
