Over the weekend i took the driveline off and greased the slip yoke, it was clunking pretty bad starting and stopping. Now its smooth as glass other than i can feel a slight shutter or rumble right as i start accelerating from a stop that i didn't notice before. Lasts just a second or two and then its gone and no problems at all after that intitial start. Any Ideas?

 

Do you have any sort of lift or leveling kit on the truck? It sounds like the driveline may be out of alignment just a touch. This is pretty common when the rear of the truck is raised. The fix is to use shims to realign, but don't ask me how to do it because I need to do it also and don't know how.

 

no lift, just leveled. i'm wondering if when i took the driveline off to grease the slip yoke i didn't get it back on the same way it came off. not sure if that'd cause it

 

That should only show up at speed (drive line speed.) Did you inspect your U-joints? Recently I was performing some maintenance on the rear end, and while the drive shaft was out, I just popped one of the caps off to take a look. What do ya know, ONE of the needle bearings was broken and 1/2 of it was missing. "Spun" fine, no binding or anything, but dead lined. New U-joint, and now the truck rides "smoother" hard to explain, but the joint was transmitting some vibration through the drive line that I had not attributed to drive line problems.

 

yeah after the intitial take off it rides smooth. i checked the ujoints while i was under there and they all seemed to be ok. I didn't see/feel anything out of the ordinary.

 

When's the last time you changed your rear diff fluid?

 

just last year. Used the Redline Synthetic brand of gear oil, and i believe that has the LS additive in it. I never noticed it before, just after i greased the slip yoke

 

If for some reason you do need to shim the driveline, crawl under the truck and there's a support where the 2 piece driveshaft joins. 2 bolts, an 1/8 in pice of steel or two and you're good to go.

 

this may be a sucky reply, but here goes anyway...pull the diff cover and check the teeth, there may be one broke in there, and maybe that broken piece of metal is floating around in the fluid, and at start off, it starts working it's way through the rest of the teeth...i dunno...

maybe hit the usual suspects before you do this...also, while you're in the rear end, check the side to side "lash" of the punkin'...there's shims in there too that could work themselves out over time, or wear out...

 

Any advice on where to get the 1/8 in pieces of steel? I need to do this bad.

 

A piece of flat stock that you drill will work on this Bob. Any hardware store should have it if there are no steel supply places around you.

 

Thanks Jim!

 

Bob,

Sorry I didn't reply sooner. I've been out of the country in Bangladesh. Jim said exactly what I did though. Got some flat stock, drilled it and installed it.

 

Mine does the same thing. Lasts for about 20 feet. I don't worry about it, amybe I should.