Noise in driveline, pinion bearing?

[Just Fishing]

I have been wanting to try my hand at doing gearing, and I might do it one day.
so far what I have done is to replace all of the bearings except for the spider gears on my S10 a few years ago.

How I did it was to take lots of pictures, measure everything, counted pinion threads.
Marked the pinion shaft and the nut for the exact position, and replaced everything with OEM bearings and seals.

that axle has had a good 100k since then and it's still kicking and solid.

When the Pinion bearing started going out, it got a nice solid vibration when going above 75.
then slowly got worse.

I also learned a little something from my Jeep.
the rear end apparently takes time to flood the axle shafts.
You can fill it, wait for 10min and it's still full.
Come back in 3 hours and it's low.

It looks like before I bought it someone changed the fluids but did the quick fill and plug.
Resulting in the level being too low to touch with my finger.

When I drained it, I got lots of shiny metal.
Wild guessing that it's from the pinion bearing due to low oil.

It needs gears for the 35in tires I want anyways, so It's just on borrowed time for now.

 

[Geotrash]

Landrovers are pretty.
Wife loved hers (freelander), but the BMW designed engine used glue to hold the cylinder inserts in the block...
Sure that probably would have worked fine, however the coolant that landrover used just happened to disolve that glue over time.

What you get is coolant in the oil.

The rule ever since is "Japanese or American cars only".

Only exception to the rule would be an antique, and maybe a Porshe 911 where I fully understand what I'm getting into.
But still, a Corvette is so much easier and cheaper to deal with.

This is my third Land Rover, and I've been fortunate that all of them have been pretty good cars. But this one is unique as it's a Volvo under the hood. Same as the XC60 of the same vintage. So it's well put together, safe, and durable overall.

 

[j91z28d1]

After many trial and errors, I feel this is the best pattern I will end up with given the shims on hand.

Backlash is right around .006, give or take a needle width.

Drive

View attachment 405839

Coast

View attachment 405840

thats a really good pattern for trial and error shimming. without the pinion depth tool, that can take a good long time.

 

[dkad260]

Update on this, Drove around easy for 15 miles, last couple miles I got up to 60-65 MPH and the diff was smooth and silent....clunk is gone also..

thats a really good pattern for trial and error shimming. without the pinion depth tool, that can take a good long time.

Thanks, yeah...it did take awhile, lol.

This was my first rebuild of a diff, it went well, just tedious and having a pinion depth tool would have changed the game a bit. If I do this again, having a much larger selection of shims will be nice.

Stock pinion shim was .037 so I tried that first.

This was a few weeks ago when I changed the axles, the pattern wasn't very large and it ran off the heel,.this was at approx 122K miles.



For the rebuild, I started with that shim for the first pattern and it seemed to follow suit of the worn pattern but being new gears and bearings it looked better, drive was still slightly biased to the heel, but coast was on the toe.

1st try on stock .037" shim: Drive


Coast


That pattern looked pretty good, but I didn't want to put it back like that hoping to center it a bit more. so I tried a .330" shim and that went too far the other way, but didn't get a pic

So I tried .350", then ended up with .360", then after I replaced the setup bearing with the pressed bearing, the pattern pretty much remained but the backlash was at .005", which might have been fine but I wanted to get .006-.007".

I'm leaning on running thicker oil after break in. I know 75W-90 is the recommended fluid, correct me if I'm wrong but does it seem that there's more of a push to 110W oil?

First fluid is Valvoline 85-140 non-synthetic, afterwards I will likely go to a 110W fluid, but will watch the MPG's first on the 140W.

 

[j91z28d1]

the other guys will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they used to call for 80w90 but it's a non synthetic, at some point that was switched to the synthetics equivalent, being 75w90. I don't know that I've seen a spec call for 110? I would have no problem using it if I was seeing a heat problem, I took a temp gun with me on my long distance tow. 75w90 did get up to about 160deg at one stop. but should be fine for the fluid. I never considered diff Temps when towing till i cause a post that said the towing capacity on these is limited by the diff size and hybrids like mine didn't have the larger diff option at any point. on a heavy tow thru like death valley with a RV wind brake, I could see temps getting up there trying the heavier weight.

being that yours is fresh and tight, I'd run the recommended stuff till you find a good reason not to.

I did find that the g80 rear hated any additive, I didn't add any, but every over the counter fluid seems to mention limited slip additive somewhere on it. which I get, cause open diff doesn't care, limited slip needs it. but ours is the middle ground. it didn't happen at first, probably 6 months later, the wife called and said this thing feels like it's binding up at parking lot speeds. she was around back when we'd push around race cars with locked spools. so he knows what it feels like. I was like OK it's still in 2wd right? I'll check it when you get home. never did it for me, but I went and stopped at the gm parts department and got 2 qt of what they said it called for. may have been a fluke, but there's a few posts around online of it happening, so I went with it.

if you get a low speed chatter or binding on u turns on hot days, might be a thing.

 

[dkad260]

Moving forward with this project, the rear is done, now to the front pinion.

Both pinions made a good bit of noise through the chassis ears, yesterday I received the front shaft from the Driveshaft store, waiting to replace this hack job of a U-joint change/rebalance.

This made a noticeable difference in smoothness, you can only add so much weight to offset a hula hoop, lol.




Not sure how much of this is the spider gears, but with both front wheels on the ground, I doubt very much. Not only the pinion bearing needs replacing, but has what seems to be a fair amount of lash, as well as driveline clunk when engaging gear from Park.