Afternoon fellas!

Long time no see, been real busy.


Anyways, quick question.


Is it hard to swap a gear carrier from one axle to another?



I'm asking cause if you guys remember back in April, my axle failed on my F350 (ran dry out of oil for a long time, and bearings were gone, and ate through the axle tube), so I need an entire new axle.

I have 4.10 gears though, if I find a full floater 3.55 axle, is it easy to swap the 4.10 carrier over into the 3.55 axle? I'd like 3.55's, but the truck is 4x4 and I'd have to swap over the front to, and the hell with that.

 

You will need to set backlash, other than that, pretty straight forward, remove the axle shafts (at least part way), remove rear diff cover, remove four bolts holding carrier in, and pull it straight out (it's pretty heavy!). Get a shim kit from the parts store, and you will need a magnetic dial indicator. If you don't set the backlash again, pretty good chance of a howling diffy. Make sure you re-use the caps and races that were with the carrier.

 

i fit ran dry long enough to take out the bearings, i would be very afraid of using the gears or carrier without rebuilding it.

if it was mine, i would look for a 3.55 axle for the rear, and swap the front to 3.55

 

Swapping a carrier can be challenging, especially if you want to swap the bearings. The shims most likely will be wrong and they set carrier bearing preload as well as backlash. Ring and pinions stay together as a set, do NOT mix and match. And setting up gears is an art unto itself, which would need to be done to swap the ratio.

Pulling carrier and pinion bearings requires special pullers and/or hydraulic press. Some people grind out the bearing ID for slip fit to get around this, I don't, I think it's hillbilly. And for proper gear setup you almost *certainly* will need to pull the pinion bearing a few times to swap the shims to get a proper pattern.

Once you install a set into a new chunk, it's wise to actually set them up again due to tolerance variations from housings and gear sets. This is particularly tricky with used gears since they have worn in the drive side preventing a visible pattern patch. The way around this is to set the pattern on the coast side since it will have less wear. On a front axle, this may not be the case due to much less load time.

You will want to read up on this extensively before playing with gear patterns. If it's *just* swapping a carrier, you only need to worry about matching backlash to it's original setting to duplicate the original pattern and create proper preload on the carrier bearings. This is very backyard novice doable. Especially on carriers that use shims *outside* the bearings. Some put them pressed under the carrier bearings, which adds quite an extra challenge. Dana 60's are like this IIRC, Sterlings are not, thankfully.

Oh and +1 to 3.55's.