How to use a Dial Indicator and Other Special Tools for Gear Setup

hey everyone mike here in the bfh garage um today's video is going to cover uh something a little bit different it's going to go over some specialized tools that i use for my axle re-gearing i've gotten some feedback from some people that have been watching those videos and they are looking for information on how to use these specialized tools such as your dial indicator your inch pound torque wrench and your micrometer and although these tools are all easy to use making sure that you use them properly is going to give you a greater chance for success at the end and why that's important is because some of these shims that you have to measure are so thin they're the same thickness as this piece of paper and that can make the difference between a successful gear setup and something that falls apart on you down the road so let's get into these tools and i'll show you how to use them okay the first thing i want to point out is that this video is intended to be for that first time user that has zero experience these tools and is just looking how to uh use these so that way they can learn to re-gear their own axle if they want to do it now i just want to caution anybody that is new to this that re-gearing an axle is not for the faint of heart it is easy to mess things up and you could have catastrophic failures resulting in needing to replace everything inside your differential so understand that um if you choose to do this that that is a decision you make and you need to live with those consequences so if you're learning to if you're wanting to learn how to read gear then this is uh this is intended for you so let's start off with some of the uh descriptions of these tools so the first thing i'm going to start off with here is going to be my inch pounds torque wrench when you look at a regular torque wrench it's a clicker style and as you turn it to tighten something you'll hear it click when you reach that specific torque spec this one here is a beam style and there's another type you can use for re-gearing and it's a it's a dial style indicator and what this does this allows you to measure a rotating force on your on your pinion to make sure that you have your preload set correctly so this one here i got from uh i got online from a bike shop or something like that this one here measures up to 60 inch pounds of torque and when we're talking about doing the pinion gear there uh you're looking to get between 16 to 20 inch pounds so this beam here would only be going over a little bit so these are pretty important to have and i'll show you how to use that in a little bit next thing we have is a is a micrometer i have a couple different ones this one here is analog it's kind of old school your numbers are right there you do have some numbers here off the side but for the purposes of us re-gearing you're not going to need to reference those or even know what they mean so that doesn't matter but you can see as i turn this knob the numbers here will move get bigger or smaller depending on how thick the item is that i'm measuring so as i start to open up the jaws here and you can see that right here that opens up and that tells you the numbers right here tell you how wide that opening is so that's how you measure certain things like shim stacks you know individual shims things like that this is a digital version of a micrometer here this one here goes in a little bit deeper depth measurements i don't need to go that deep that's just the way this one come i'll measure them down to the thousandth of an inch i don't need anything greater than that so um but this does the same thing i turn it and then it'll measure what i need the last thing i want to talk about is going to be the dial indicator i think this can be pretty intimidating for some people with everything that needs to go on and move with this thing but to be honest with you it is a very simple tool even though it has all these knobs dials and angles and spins and magnets it is a very simple tool to use and i will go into greater detail on that but the the gist of this is right here is your measuring component so when this thing pushes in or out you see how that dial spins what that's going to do is it's going to let you check a little bit of measurement between your gear set to check backlash but you could see you could push this thing all the way in and it'll spin several different times and you have a smaller dial in there that would give you greater numbers the only thing we are going to be talking about today and the only thing we really care about are those small movements like that so i'll get into that show you how all this works as well okay so the first tool i want to talk about today is going to be the micrometer we use this micrometer to measure shim thickness and that's important because on each side of these bearing caps either under the bearings or outside the bearings we have shims and what that does shims allow this ring gear right here to either move this way or this way now my hand uh motions here are exaggerated but you're talking some of these shims are as thin as paper this one here is a three thousandth of an inch thick shim and if you put it on one side or the other it's going to move the carrier one way or the other that three thousandths of an inch and yes three thousandths of an inch which is as thick as this piece of paper can be critical in making sure that this uh gear is set up correctly so when we're looking at a micrometer i'm gonna go with the digital one here first because it's probably easy to read and understand so this one here gives me the option to zero out you can see how that you know lone hanging number out there so i can push and hold this and that's gonna reset it to zero now i know i'm starting at zero when i back this out you'll see the numbers move so i'm going to take a shim that is supposed to be in the 30 000 range of thickness i'm going to insert it right between these two points right here and as i tighten down the micrometer and it's kind of hard to do while i'm showing you as well as i tighten down the micrometer you're going to hear this handle click that tells me it's tight as i need it to be to measure and for being a 30 000 thick shim it's actually measuring at just over 29 thousands so you have to understand when they make these shims they are not exactly 30 000 they're not exactly 3 000 but they're pretty darn close and that will be good enough for us using these to set up gears so i can back that off pull this one out and then i'll get one known to be close to three thousandths here we'll measure down on that one ah and you got to be careful with these smaller or thinner shims because they bend easy just like paper and you can bend the shim and if you bend the shim it becomes useless you need to get another one and in today's uh rebuild kits the thinner shims are getting harder to find so you want to make sure you you protect those thinner shims so as i start to tighten that down it's showing that i have a three thousands plus a little bit another you know um what is that thirty thousand so you need to understand that three thousandths is what this shim is going to be classified as and you don't need to worry about that other number now one thing i do want to caution against when people measure shim stacks and you see it all the time they'll take all of their shims together then they'll put them in here and they'll measure them all at once and you don't want to do that because it has a pretty big potential to give you a false reading of what you have there could either be gear oil or dust or something in between those shims and you could measure something out at a certain width and it could in fact be off by a couple thousands or even more than that so when you're measuring shim stacks i highly encourage you to measure the individual shims make sure they're clean you got to get all the packing grease off of there you have to get any type of gear oil that may have gotten on there all that stuff off of there measure them individually then add them up to the number that you're going to want now on the analog version here same thing so i'll get my 30 000 shim i'll put that in there but you're just going to watch the numbers actually uh change and they're going to stop and it should be somewhere around 29 thousandths of my guess so you'll see it's 29 thousands and you don't have those additional numbers so i would write this down as a 30 thousandths shim and then i would uh throw that in the in the mix and uh go from there now if it's smaller towards the 29 thousandths more than it is the 30 thousandths then i may make a certain note on that shim um that it's more towards 29 because if i have another 30 thousands classified shim and it's more towards the 31 000 side then i have a span there that if i'm trying to dial something in perfectly that i could either go to a smaller shim or a bigger one by one thousandth of an inch to get something dialed in perfectly so understand that while i'm trying to tell you to operate in the in the uh thousandths of an inch sometimes that little bit of a smaller shim can help out when you're really trying to get something dialed in perfectly so that's all there is to a micrometer it's pretty simple i suppose i should uh point out real quick too that you have two different dials on this back side this this small one here opens up and it's a firm as you close it it's firm so i can tighten this up and make that number start to go in the negative you don't want to do that you can use this to move it out but as you get close you want to use that knob that's going to ratchet and that's as tight as you want to go now the analog one has the same thing the big one here that does the the big tightening and then as you get closer you get to this one here and it starts ratcheting that's as tight as you want to go and that will give you an accurate measurement uh consistently let's move on to the beam style torque wrench okay so let's talk about the beam style torque wrench again you could use a dial style torque wrench but those are really expensive and the whole purpose of this tool right here is to measure the rotational force needed to turn this pinion and that's important because you have to have a certain amount of preload on those bearings they need to be tucked in tight enough with each other that they don't um wobble around but you don't want them so tight that there's too much friction and they burn up on you there's a really uh fine happy spot in there and that's why we use the beam style torque wrench to determine that now when you sit here and look at the beam style torque wrench you're going to see that it's graduated in inch pounds so 10 20 30 on up to 60 and as you hold on to the end ball here and you start to rotate the beam will move over to whatever the required torque is to rotate this and that's what we're looking for so on a new setup i'm looking for 16 to 20 inch pounds on most uh occasions but i would always like to tell everybody go with what your particular gear manufacturer's recommendation is i know the factory service manual um gives a high end of that torque value of 20 to 40 inch pounds on the dana 30 and dana 44s at least in the tj and for the aftermarket stuff that's just a little bit too high you risk a chance of burning up your bearings if you go that high so go with what the gear manufacturer's recommendations are or if you start getting some experience you'll figure out what works for you so the way this whole thing works here from a uh from a bike shop i got this beam style thing here and it's got this little quarter inch uh adapter there so i have to step it up a couple times now can that affect torque absolutely it can but in the case we're doing this once everything's turned because we're dealing with such a small amount of torque i'm not worried about it being off by that much it's not a big deal once you start turning this thing and all these pieces rotate and they get into the tight position then your torque wrench will be as close as you need it to be to measure this so again we are wrote we are measuring rotating force we're not measuring what it takes to get the pinion started you don't want to include that because as you go to turn this it may take a little bit to get it started and you'll see this number jump up and then it it uh smooths out and evens out and as you're rotating your torque wrench you're looking at the indicator here for what the consistent number is as it is moving around in a circle so to use the torque wrench it's fairly straightforward put it on your pinion nut put a little pressure on it before i take this off and what i do is i rotate it now if you notice right here you see how the beam is already starting to bend before it even uh starts rotating and that's called our breakaway force in order to get this thing rotating so i don't include that what i do is i get it rotating so it gets away from that breakaway force and then it will maintain a consistent torque there and as i'm rotating this i'm looking to see where that dial indicator where the beam is and that's going to tell me what my inch pounds required to turn this is right now or what my preload is currently set at so i'm going to do that start rotating you see i broke away so this is a used setup and it is reading about 12 inch pounds as i rotate so as i'm going around just seeing where that beam's at and it's rotating right about 12 inch pounds to turn this now you have to understand this is an old axle all of this stuff's coming out so 12 inch pounds is because this thing has been driven probably 150 000 miles so everything's worn in everything starting to show where things start to loosen up and that's completely normal okay the last thing i want to show you is how to use a dial indicator and the gist of a dial indicator is that this little needle right here at the end of this at the end of this dial will be placed at the end of a tooth and then you see how that dial moves as it moves back and forth but before i get into that i want you to understand the difference between a high pinion and a low pinion axle so if you imagine looking at the axle from the side a high pinion means that your pinion gear is going to be on the higher side of this differential a low pinion means your pinion gear is going to be down here and on a high pinion axle your gears run in what's called reverse rotation versus your low pinion so if you look closely here at the teeth you're going to see how you have one that kind of goes flat and each tooth is the same but you have a side that is flat and you have a side that goes at an angle this flat side is called your drive side the angled side is called your coast side now this is a high pinion axle so the drive side is on the upper side up here and i have a ring gear here from a low pinion axle and if you notice here the flat side is on the bottom and the cosine which goes up at a slant is on the top side so understand that that's different and that does make a difference on where you put your dial indicator so i'm working currently on a high pinion 30 so my dial indicator i'm going to need to put on this side of the ax or this side of the housing and it's going to come up over and drop on where if it was low opinion i'd have to put it over here and it's going to come down and over and then up so when you start adjusting these things you need to take that into consideration and i'll show you what i'm talking about so by looking at the way my dial indicator is set up here i can tell you that the last axle that i did a gear job on was a low pinion because it's set up to be on this side and catch the drive side of the ring gear like this so in order to set up a high pinion i'm going to have to move everything around you got to kind of adjust everything to fit so you got to find a spot you get a magnetic base here and what that does is i can set it here and once i turn this on it will stay where i put it but you got to be careful where you put it because it can still move a little bit so make sure that it's firm wherever you set it now it doesn't matter that if it's catching a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it's at a slight angle because once you get it set then you'll be able to get an accurate measurement so in this case here if i come here and i set it that is good enough that i could adjust this back over and catch my ring gear the way i want to do it so now as you're looking at this you can see that i'm nowhere near where i need to be for this thing so i have to get things adjusted in order to do this so this die or this little uh clamp dial here allows me to move this entire assembly up or down and like i said based on how it's set up now i can tell you that i was using it on a low opinion so on a high pinion side if i put this here that's going to give me my most clamping force i want to loosen this and i'm going to move this up here you know a little bit of a waste here just random spot it doesn't have to be exact because you can move everything to adjust down to the tooth now the other thing i'm looking at here is my my pen my indicator pin there is still off of that tooth so i have a dial here that allows me to either tighten or loosen and i can bring it in to where i want so now i can see that i'm getting close to that i'm going to take and raise it up a little bit let it get over still have a problem here though because the back side of this is hitting a tooth also so to get this thing dialed in perfectly no pun intended i know now i need to rotate this arm this way so again i can loosen this here rotate it slightly out and then i can also undo this kind of get everything set up the way i want put it back and now i can loosen this back it up into there just a little bit and then on the back side here i can loosen this and it's going to allow me to wrote this rotate this up or down and right now i feel like i'm leaning too far back so what i want to do is loosen this up come this way with it take this one move it over and move it backwards a little bit and then i think i'll have a better success at catching that tooth so part of it is getting everything set up right now i don't know that i'm completely on that tooth it feels like it's pretty loose still my little knob on the back here is a little bit loose so i got to tighten that up to make sure that the indicator is not loose because that'll affect my reading then i can take this off and i can start to slowly go down what that's going to do is it's going to make that pin go up and you see the dial start to move right that means i know that i have it engaged i can turn it back on everything's right there i want to come back here and make sure i'm going to bring the camera over here and show you i want to make sure that that pin right here the the measuring tool is not rubbing up against the tooth behind it because that would also affect your reading so we want to make sure we get everything uh exactly where it needs to be and then we could start measuring our backlash once you have your dial indicator set up for whether you're going to be measuring low or high pinion you can just undo it pull it off the next axle you go to it's going to be relatively close to the same position so you should be able to just come in here figure out which tooth it is you're going to want to uh measure from get everything kind of in that ballpark make sure that it's not catching the tooth behind turn your magnet on make any minor adjustments i can look that i have a gap behind the plunger in that the tooth that's behind the one i'm measuring everything looks good so once you have your dial indicator set now what you need to do is you need to take your ring gear and you want to make sure you're not turning the pinion because that will influence your your reading so i have a clamp on the back of mine to keep the pinion from moving at all normally with new gears it's not a big issue but if you try to put too much force here up or down it could make it go further than it needs to so i have the pinion lock down right now where it's not going to turn you take your ring gear and you move it back and forth so up and down and you see that needle move so to get a good reading i could leave it there and say i'm starting at 84 and i'm going to 92 which would give me backlash of eight thousandths or if i want i can go in and move my indicator towards zeros out right there and that gives me eight thousandths as well so you could either do the math in your head or you can zero it out rotate it back and forth and see you're at eight thousandths right there now you can hear the clunk that means one tooth is touching the other back and forth and that sound is your backlash so if you're just starting to learn gears i hope that this video helped you out i really enjoy getting the viewer request for videos they'd like to see something else on that gives me uh more ideas on content that i can upload so if you have any suggestions let me know and i'll see what i can do for those that are wondering how thick that piece of paper is right here is a 3 000 inch shim that's actually used to go by the carrier bearings as you can see that measures at just over three thousandths of an inch if i get that piece of paper that's over there open this up and i slide this piece of paper in regular writing tablet paper starting to tighten down a little bit just right at 3 000 of an inch so yes you do have shims that are flimsy as this piece of paper

Channel: The BFH Garage

Views: 2,169

Rating: 4.9583335 out of 5

Keywords: Film Maker Pro, Jeep, Wrangler, TJ, YJ, JK, XJ, JL, JT, Gladiator, How to, 4x4, Offroad, fix it, Colorado, Trail, DIY, ARB, D30, D44, Dana 30, Dana 44, 8.8, Ford 8.8, Axle Swap, Axle Build, Metalcloak, duroflex joint, Rebuild, Brackets, Spring perch, Fab, Fabrication, regear, Joints, Spicer

Id: cQihCOHh-po

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021