I hear what you guys are saying and for a standard rear axle I agree that is what you need to do. My own experience in setting up other axles that use a crush sleeve (mainly, on 8.8's) I've done the same. I've never been a huge fan of simply just taking a huge breaker bar, cheater bar, ect. as axles need to be set up with precision. That means a torque wrench and sometimes a torque multiplier to accomplish the job.
Now, a 14 bolt is not your standard axle. Trust me, I
wanted to be able to just torque it down using the torque multiplier and torque wrench, but it just isn't happening. The link below is an extremely detailed write up on gear set up for a 14 bolt.
http://www.pirate4x4.com/tech/billavista/PR-ARB/articles/14b_Gear_Setup/I don't expect anyone to rear the whole thing, but I will say it is worth it for the tech and general theory behind gearing any axle. Anyways, this is the main part I pulled from it to explain why you can't just torque it down and obtain proper bearing preload.
"The next step is the trickiest part of the whole procedure. You need to press the front pinion bearing cone onto the pinion shaft, seating it in its race, without crushing the crush sleeve too much. In order to get over the pinion shaft you'll need to use a tube to bear on the inner ring of the bearing cup. You want to seat the bearing firmly, and even begin crushing the sleeve a little to begin setting pinion bearing preload. This can save time and effort later when you are tightening the pinion nut to crush the sleeve and set final preload. However, you don't want to go too far. If you crush the sleeve too much at this point, you will find that later, when you go to tighten the pinion nut, bearing preload will be achieved before you get the pinion nut tight enough (once again - don't ask how I know this!). On the other hand, if you just press the bearing on loosely, and don't even begin to crush the sleeve, you can have a hell of a job later, trying to start the sleeve crushing by tightening the pinion nut. I've heard reports of it taking upwards of 500 ft/lbs - which requires a heck of an impact gun or a seriously sturdy bench/vice and a BIG breaker bar. The trick is to use the press to seat the bearing and just start the sleeve crushing. Once the sleeve has started crushing - it takes a lot less torque on the pinion nut to continue crushing it. Like crushing a beer can in you hands - once it starts buckling it's much easier. The best method is to press a little at a time and check frequently how tight the bearing is in its race. Once again - too far, and you'll find yourself later at max bearing preload with the pinion nut torqued to only 100 ft/lbs - which isn't really tight enough to keep it tight. If you do cock it up - you'll have to press the pinion out of the crush sleeve and front bearing cone, install a new crush sleeve, and start again. I then reverted to a 3/4"-drive torque wrench to do the final tightening. Tighten the pinion nut initially to 300-350 ft/lbs, then remove the torque wrench and yoke holder and take a reading of the torque required to rotate the pinion, using your in/lb torque wrench. Proper pinion bearing preload is achieved when the torque required to rotate the pinion is 5-15 in/lbs for used bearings or 25-35 in/lbs for new bearings."
So anyways, like I said I wanted to be able to torque it down and call it good. I still first started with my press though to follow the advise in that write up. I can say 12 tons wasn't enough to crush the sleeve. So, I then figured I'd try torquing it. I initially tried up to 400 ft/lbs and it didn't even budge. Today, we had it on Nate's 20 ton press. Even with 20 tons of power it was still tough to do. We were seriously cranking on the press to even start collapsing the crush sleeve. So then today after we started crushing the sleeve on the press we were able to finished it off with the torque multiplier / torque wrench combo. At 400 ft/lbs of torque we had a perfect 30 in/lbs of preload.
So same 400 ft/lbs of torque with two very different results. Without starting to collapse the crush sleeve I did nothing but pull a muscle in my back. Seriously, I couldn't even seat the bearings. With the crush sleeve started already on the press, 400 ft/lbs gave me my perfect bearing preload.
