A lot of looking, reading, hoping, and praying with this front axle. I have learned a whole lot in the past few weeks. I think this pattern is worthy. Perfect no, but probably about as close as I'm going to be able to get it considering certain aspects of the gear. You may have noticed my other post in the '73 to '91 K5 section where I near panicked because I couldn't get the gears to even spin. Turns out the backlash was at zero. Since then I've changed my shim depth for the pinion several times and played with the backlash three or four times. I'm currently Running a 0.039 inch pinion shim and I've got backlash between 0.007 and 0.009. I have no clue what my carrier preload is but I know it's enough to go down the road because I had to beat the shims in with the hammer and shim driver. These gears are slightly out of round but I measured in four places and nothing was out of the backlash parameters in the instruction manual that came with the gears. I learned they were out around by measuring the axial run out. If they had been much worse I would have returned them. I still have time to change it but I think I'm going to call it good for today. I need to set the preload on my crush sleeve eliminator tomorrow. From there I'll probably press the pinion bearing on unless someone can convince me that I need to adjust my backlash or pinion shim some more.
tried it after that and was at 22 to 25-in pounds. My beam torque wrench is hard to read. Dropped it down 0.001-in in my shim thickness and nailed it, 17in lbs. If I had more time I think I could have dropped the carrier in and ran a final contact pattern but I guess that will be tomorrow. The only interesting thing is I've had at least two people tell me 20-in to 25-in pounds for the preload but literally every piece of literature I have read has said 14 to 19-in lbs so I'm going to go with the literature.
