Gear install

[fiveo'cobra]

My car has 95K miles on it and i'm about to do a 4:10 install. I've heard from many people that you need to buy the right size shims along with the gears to avoid problems down the road, but now i'm hearing something different. A shop is telling me that you are not supposed to mess with the shims unless you absolutley have to. So my question is, what did you guys do? What is the right way to do it? Shims or no shims? sizes? etc etc etc


thanks all.

 

[1105]

Each car will be different... I reused all of the stock shims with no problems as of yet... As long as its shimmed right, you wont get any sounds coming from the rearend. We ended up swaping the shims from the left over to the right, and from the right over to the left and everything measured up correctly. Unless you have the proper tools, I would suggest you NOT do this install by yourself. You need tools to measure pinion depth, need a inch pound torque wrench, ft pount torque wrench, I think a caliper to measure the shimming of parts, and a few other standard tools. Took me and my dad about 4 hours to rebuild the track-lock and install new gears.

 

[fiveo'cobra]

thanks man.

 

[HISSIN50]

FWIW, if interested in reading about the ins and outs, Scott (Mo Dingo) has a link in his sig from his experience doing his. i thought he did a nice write up.

 

[TrueBlue95GT]

The writeup I used:
http://www.angelfire.com/theforce/5ohcpa/cpa5ohtech001.htm

 

[fiveo'cobra]

^^^

Wow, that site kicks ass. Thanks TrueBlue.

One last Q would be for you guys with 4:10's. Are any of you running them without a speed calibrator?? How big of a differnece does it make with that? Like how bad is the speedo off?

 

[mo_dingo]

Yep, there should be absolutely no need to change the carrier shims. They are two really big shims, one on each side. After you setup the dial indicator & measure the backlash, if you are within spec, then you don't need to mess with the carrier shims.

The gears don't come with carrier shims anyway, so you would need to go buy some from Ford. I didn't need to b/c my backlash was within spec.

The shim you do need to change is the pinion shim. This is done by measuring the pinion heads on both the new & old pinion with a dial or digital caliper. If the new pinion is taller, you need to remove some from the total thickness from the shims. If the new pinion is smaller, you need more thickness.

i.e. if the new pinion is .001 smaller , you need to add .001 to the new pinion to ensure proper pinion depth. The stock shim will be a big one, so you can just replace it with 2 smaller shims that equal the total thickness required.

Check out the link in my sig for more information.
Scott