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good Resource on Swapping Front axle ring and Pinion?


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Setting up gears is incredibly meticulous and time consuming. It requires several expensive tools and a lot of patience, and practice. It is going to be 100 times easier to find a different front axle with the gearing you want than to buy new gears, and have them put in.

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Setting up gears is meticulous and time consuming but you don't need expensive tools. A simple dial indicator and torque wrench will get you the numbers you need. If you search online, you can get the range of numbers those have to be between.

 

If you're using the same carrier, most of the time you don't need to even re-shim anything. When my buddy and I did his 30HP, we put in 4.10's with the new carrier and the stock shims worked perfect (not saying this will always work but I've seen it turn out this way a few times now).

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When I bought My truck the people who had it before threw 4.56 Gearing in the rear, and didn't do the front. I have the ring and pinion and some other misc. parts related to it. I was just Hoping to get the ring and pinion in so I could Do some 4 wheeling before i Moved away from new york and back to florida. I was gonna try to do that without spending much money, but I guess that is not going to happen because the general consensus seems to be.. "Its a pain in the a** if you even get it right " and " It cost out the teeth to pay someone?". I'd much rather fix it at a later date when I have a little extra money that I don't need to save. Thanks For reinforcing what I thought.

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If you want to set up your own gears, there's a TOTW (Topic Of The Week) on Pirate4x4 from a while ago that goes into it.

 

http://www.pirate4x4.com/forum/showthre ... light=TOTW

 

I've set up gears by feel in a few different axles so far and have yet to have one go bad. Unless the pinion says to add or subtract shims, start with the original shims and go from there. Your best bet would be to see if you can rent a dial gauge (with magnetic base) and buy extra bearings to use as setup bearings (open up the inside of the bearing slightly so they slip on the carrier and ring gear and you can slip them back off to add more shims). If I remember right, the D30 has the shims under the bearings on the carrier and under the inside bearing on the pinion.

 

One thing I forgot...If you can get an inch/lb torque wrench too, then you can get everything perfectly in spec.

 

Differential.com has all the specs that you'd need for the axle, just scroll down the link below and find the Dana 30 under the Dana Spicer heading.

 

http://www.differentials.com/specsi.html

 

The first time might be a days job but I've gotten down to rear axles being 2-3 hours (from rolling in to rolling out) and the front is another hour or two beyond that due to having to pull EVERYTHING apart.

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@Geonovast Yes I have and am Actively Considering that, But I personally Think a Cheaper alternative would be just Get a Stock Ratio Axle in the rear. I'm pretty Sure Stock Ratio can handle 33's. 4.10 Stock axles would be nice, but I'm probaly Not gonna Be able to find any locally for a good price, I'm trying to save a lot of my money so I can move Back to Florida Plus I'm also Dealing with Electrical issues on this truck, But I'm Making Progress In those issues.

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