How to properly set up and measure your Pinion Angle on your Muscle Car

hey what's happening guys today we're going to talk a little bit about pinion angle and i'm going to show you how i set the pinion angle up on my car [Music] now there's a lot of information out there online and it gets really confusing partially because a lot of it is misinformation a lot of it's just flat wrong and some of the videos that you see youtube and otherwise don't really quantify what they're talking about setting up pinion angle on a drag car is completely different than setting up the pinion angle on a street car there's differences if you have coil springs in the rear of your car versus if you have say leaf springs there's quite a few differences and it makes all this information really confusing if somebody doesn't know exactly what they're talking about so hopefully today i can simplify some of those things for you if you're in a position trying to figure out how to set your right pinion angle i'll make it really simple and i'll show you some of the tools that i've used to do it correctly and accurately the last thing you're going to want is to set your pinion angle get everything welded in get get your rear end set get that car out for a test drive and figure out that it wobbles like crazy it's 50 60 70 miles an hour that's the last thing you want here's a couple things that we can do to avoid that and some things to pay attention to number one get yourself a couple of tools to determine pinion angle i like to use a straight edge any kind of ruler like this helps any kind of straight edge that you can put on a flat surface underneath the car obviously if you have a lift makes it really easy if you don't you can jack up the car try to get it on jack stands but you're always going to want to make sure that the car is on its own weight if at all possible and you're going to be wanting to do all of this while it's at right height if you have coilovers if you have air ride you're going to want to get those adjusted so that you can take these measurements at actual ride height because your pinion angle is going to change as your car gets higher or as it gets lower so you always set your pinion angle at ride height that's how you do it now go ahead and grab a pencil and paper and i'll show you underneath my car where you're going to want to take the measurements from and where i do it from so for the front of the car the best place that i found to measure from is using the crank pulley what i always do is i put a straight edge of some kind up against the crank pulley get it flat and then put your angle finder up against that again you're going to want to get it completely vertical make sure there's no dust or debris or anything on there that would uh change your angle get it totally clean put your angle finder up against there get the measurement on the front and this is going to be the same as your transmission output shaft the crank on any engine setup should always be in line with the trans output shaft so this is always a foolproof way to get a measurement a lot of times on a transmission the pan and other angles like that that you'd think would be flat aren't actually that you think would be in line aren't actually in line so this is the foolproof way to do it um in my case i'm about 2.5 degrees pointed down sloping down towards the back of the car there you go now the drive shaft measurement is a pretty straightforward one to get that you're going to want to get your measurement from anywhere on the drive shaft in this case magnetic angle finder makes it really easy place that bad boy there anywhere on the drive shaft make sure it's nice and straight let it level off and get your degree if the engine is pointing down say two and a half three degrees your drive shaft could either be pointing up towards the back of the car or pointing down so you're going to want to pay attention if it's a positive 2.5 or a negative 2.5 keep those in line now the last measurement you're going to want to get is on your pinion yoke the angle at which it's pointing and you're going to want to pay attention to whether it's pointing up or pointing down and in this case this is a chevy 12 volt rear end there's not a good place to get a measurement on any of these like ribs that are on the actual housing itself what i like to do is you can either disconnect your drive shaft and get a measurement from across this machine surface here or in this case this has a nice little uh flange on it that i know is perfectly flat so what i do is i put my uh straight edge against it there make sure it's completely flat up against it and then i get my measurement off of that in this case i am pointed up 2.5 degrees what i'm going to talk about today is on coil spring cars that's because i don't have anything with leaf springs if you have leaf springs your numbers are likely going to be a little bit different and the reason that is is because leaf springs don't control a rear end the rotation under load quite as well as a coil spring car that has say a four link so that's why those tolerances are going to be different that's why the numbers for leaf spring is going to be different so what i'm talking about today is going to be for a street driven car if you've got a drag car this isn't going to help you this is this is this isn't going to help you at all your car is going to be under a ton more pressure a ton more load and there's different operating angles that you want to worry about if you have a drag car so everything i'm talking about is how to set your car up for the street this is a street car with coil springs street car or truck with coil springs now what you want to remember number one step one is you always want to point your engine and transmission down you want to point it downhill towards the back i've never heard of anybody pointing it uphill so obviously you want to point it downhill but you don't want to point it downhill at a really extreme angle the generally accepted angle that everybody likes to say is three degrees if it's three degrees or less not zero so let's say half a degree to three degrees you're in good shape there's a lot of variables that determine how you can set that up a lot of times there's not a ton of room in there your transmission tunnel can determine what angle it needs to be at also the position of the engine the height of the engine in your motor mounts that also can be a limitation when you're setting up your engine and transmission angle as a general rule you try to get it less than three degrees but not zero degrees two degrees in my mind is about perfect and that's what i've read uh in a lot of places that's the generally accepted angle is point your engine and transmission down at about two degrees that's the first thing the second thing before we do anything else is we're not going to pay attention to the driveline angle right now we're going to want to set our transmission and engine down at two degrees and we're going to want to set our rear diff up at about two degrees and when you do that those angles are parallel those two things are completely parallel and that means they offset each other when it comes to operating angles on the driveline so so why is that parallel important it's because you want the ink the operating angles of each of those ends of those driveline to offset and that's important because on those universal joints you need there to be an equal amount on the front as there is on the back and that's because they're not a cv joint cv stands for constant velocity if you have a u-joint that has an angle on one side that doesn't match the angle on the other there's going to be a ton of vibrations because it oscillates at a different rate it you can there's a lot of online videos that show how that happens now you don't want to have really extreme degrees above five or so because then your operating angles on those u-joints is too extreme u-joints are only meant to basically work within a say a three degrees operating angle so that's why you can't have a seven or eight or nine or 10 degree engine pointing down for a street car you want to keep those below three degrees not zero but below three degrees and as close as you can as possible and if you do that you're gonna be good to go if you go to spicer.com they've got a page on their website that allows you to put in your angles one two and three the ones i showed you under the car and it'll show you what your operating angles are for the first for the first u-joint and for the second u-joint that's great and when once you have those numbers you want to run it by these three rules rule number one your u-joint operating angles on both ends need to be at least a half a degree again these u-joints aren't designed to be completely flat there'd be a ton of wobble the the needle bearings in the u-joints aren't meant for that you need to have it be at least a half a degree rule number two the operating angles at the front drive shaft u-joint in the rear drive shaft you don't need to be within one degree of each other again that's to say that they should be as close to each other as possible and if you can get those the exact same then perfect in rule number three like i mentioned before your u-joint operating angle should always be less than three degrees u-joints are only meant to have about a three-degree operating angle and any time that you exceed that if it's four if it's five you increase the likelihood that you're going to see some vibrations in your car so keep those three rules in mind the last tip that i have for you is an app really cool app made by treymaker it's called the traymek toolkit and it's an app that once you download on your smartphone ios and android once you download the app you click on the driveline angle finder and you literally set your phone in these three spots the first one is the engine one that i showed you the engine transmission angle the second one is the driveline angle and the last one is the rear diff angle and you literally hit the button to calculate once your phone is placed you hit the button to calculate in each one of those angles and then it tells you if you're in spec or not um that's a really cool app because it'll let you know which one is not in spec and again you can adjust those sometimes you need to shim up your transmission sometimes you need to adjust via your upper or lower control arms your diff angle if you have that so that's a really good way to get it dialed in if you're noticing vibrations or if even you're setting it up for the first time check out that app from treymak really cool i hope you liked today's video guys if that was informative please feel free to give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to our channel to stay tuned to our classic car projects and updates if you thought i was dead wrong today you think everything that i said was incorrect i'd love to hear from you go ahead and leave a comment we can start a debate in the comment section and figure out who's right and who's wrong if you had any questions about anything you saw to in today's video feel free to leave a comment and i'll get back to you thank you so much guys we look forward to seeing you in the next video thanks [Music]

Channel: Classic Nation

Views: 259,106

Keywords: Pinion angle, muscle car pinion angle, how to determine pinion angle, classic car pinion angle, ls swap pinion angle, calculating pinion angle, how to figure out pinion angle, adjusting pinion angle, driveshaft pinion angle, correcting pinion angle, driveline vibrations, how to adjust pinion angle, classic nation, pinion gearbox, pinion, pinion angle, pinion bearing noise, driveshaft, drive shaft, drive shaft replacement, drive shaft angle, restoration, classic cars, hot rods

Id: SDjBHT5-u_4

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020