Pinion Depth Checking With Simple Tools

hey I'm Todd and welcome to Acme Machining uh today what we're going to talk about is setting up pinion depth when you're set changing the gears or bearings in the rear end of the vehicle I've had a few people ask me these questions some people have tried it and messed it up messed up a good gear set so I figured I'd go through and tell you the checks that I do and it's really simple stupid and it doesn't take a whole lot of fancy tools so like if you've got a Vineyard caliper and a straight edge you can make it work for you so come along we're going to have some fun today so what we're looking at here I got a picture up on my computer and the most important thing is mounting distance because that is actually the distance that's set by the differential manufacturer when they make the differential housing it is the distance from the back of the pinion and shim to the center line of the actual axles that your wheels connect to one thing we can check easily is the checking distance which is the from the top of the pinion to the center line of the axle so I'm going to show you the quick way to get around these and check these out and as long as you follow these you're going to have a real hard time messing up the differential and set an opinion so to make this easy to show you guys what I did is I went to the junkyard and I got a bent differential it's out of a Ram 1500 it was in an accident and they they bent the axle tube so it's no good but I was able to get this from the junkyard and uh we're going to tear this one apart and make some measurements on it so stick around so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to do it off camera because you guys don't want to listen to my air gun running and uh I'm just going to pop the bolts out of these bearing caps and then we'll get set up to take some measurements so I'll be right back so I've loosened the bolts out of here and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take the bolt and stand it up and I'm going to give it a hit and you always keep these in the order that you take them apart and the side you take them apart so if you don't want them turning upside down you don't want them backwards or anything else so I just picked that up and I usually set it in a tray that I'm working along the back side right there and now what we have to do is we have to find the center line of the axle that goes through the here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick up the difference between here and the height of this bearing I'll do it on both sides I'll just wipe them off slightly now nothing's moved if I turn this upside down it will stay in there because of the preload on the bearings probably noticed to get these apart in the car and you've still got to do some awful grunting and groaning there these two holes here or these two holes depending on the tool you have can be used to spread this apart you usually spread them only like four or five thousandths of an inch no more because it doesn't like to return to the original but you can spread these out with you have the special tool but normally I just take a couple primers and get in here and pop this up so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get a measurement on the top of these what we're trying to measure is the difference between this surface here and this surface right here to start with okay so what I'm going to do is if I take my venue scale caliper and I measure my straight edge which is 14 or 1.425 and I zero it now what I've got is that there is that distance right there okay and we'll come around the other side here so I'm not near guys of the way and I'm going to measure down to the top of this I like doing it this way because you got more level space and you can read it 0.4625 [Music] so I've cleaned the surface off just with a flat file because if I got corrosion like I do down here it's going to throw off my reading when I try to lay a flat Edge straight edge across like that so I just cleaned up the corrosion on both sides with a straight edge and now I'm going to come in here and I'm going to measure and I've got .473 and 0.473 and a half so 0.473 it is now I'm going to pull this oh ring gear and carrier right and I'm just going to find a wrench that'll fit one of these nuts and uh I'll be back and show you the easy way to roll them up now the differential actually has adjustable screw in cups from each side so uh you just take a tool and unscrew those um but I'm going to show you what I use to get the the carrier out of the differential housing uh if you had something like a GM rear end where you had to uh actually had solid shims in there and you had to wedge it out so I'm just going to set you up on the tripod here again let's back off here a little bit I find a wrench that fits the ring gear nuts now of course this isn't attached to a car so for a truck whatever you're working on so it's not going to be as easy as that but I put the wrench and I put it against the face of the differential and then I grab one of the teeth like you say and you can start to work it out now one thing you can do is you can take and put like a half inch piece of copper pipe through or a piece of rebar or something like that because a lot of times this thing is setting up on it's certain so this space is vertical and as soon as you pop this out you've got this thing coming flying at you so have somebody help you or uh like I said put a piece of rebar in through the axle tubes and it'll hold it in for when you knock it Loose it doesn't come flying at you but once you get it of course like I said excuse my head this isn't in a truck so it is a wanting to move around a little more than I want it to but I've got it loose but this one I'm going to have to actually back the adjuster right here foreign cap is so this is the tool for a Dodge rear end foreign [Music] [Music] and if you're reusing anything keep them separate don't get this bearing cup mixed up with that bearing cup I'm just going to set this down on the ground and again I set that on my bench and this one on my bench it's on the floor right now but if I had a trolley bench working underneath the rear of this truck that's what I'd be using so I'm just going to pause for a minute clean some oil off my hands here and I'll be back the next measurement we want to take is from the surface here to the top of our opinion okay so we're going to be going I'm just going to extend this we're going to be measuring right to the top of this okay from this surface now you got to trust your straight edge and you can check it a number of ways you can check it with another straight edge so hold one straight edge like this to it and make sure that it doesn't have any deviation or you can set it up like this and you can flip it now I wanted to keep it simple for everybody because most people have a six inch Vineyard scale uh I have an eight inch but I didn't want to cheat and use an eight inch because most people don't have any games so what I'm going to do is it's I set this to zero this way and I've I've got it zeroed out that way and I reach in and I feel Square with that and I'm going to lower this down until I come down onto my straight edge and I have 4.9 just one second to get squarier again 4.9 it's hard to see in this light 4.941 so I'm going to write that down in my book now thank you I'm just going to remove this quickly be gentle on your tools you don't need to hold it like it's the going to fly off and hit somebody just be gentle with it this is a straight edge like any of your Precision Instruments take care of them okay so we've got the measurement from the top of this to this surface right here we've got a measurement here we've got a measurement from here to the top of our bearing now what I'm going to do there's two ways you can do this you can measure it yourself or you can go online and check the specifications for the bearings and they will give you a measurement so I'm zeroed out hope you can see this sometimes the lighting gives off a lot of glare but I am three point three one zero so I'm going to write that down and then we're going to do some math so I hope you can see this good I'm going to use the screwdriver as a pointer here what we have so far is we have from the surface to the top of this bearing we measured that off at 0.473 the bearing diameter is 3.310 now we need the radius of this so we divide it by 2 and we get one point six five five so the center point of this bearing the screwdriver is just approximate from this here is 1.655 plus 0.473 so we have 2.128 from this surface to the center line of the axle so if the axle was going through the center of this bearing like the screwdriver is now approximately this here is going to be two point two inches 0.128 from the surface of here and we know that the surface of here to the top of this pinion is a 4.941 and we subtract our two point our Center Line so from the center line here to the top of this is the measurement we need that is called the checking distance and we subtract the the uh the distance from here to the top which was 494.1 minus uh 2.128 which gives us a checking distance from here to here is 2.813 so now that we've got that and that's an important measurement to drop down and keep now of course you got to jot all these down unless you're some got a calculator built into your brain that just eats all these numbers up that distance is going to be very similar when we put our next pinion in I don't have another pinion to put this in but I'm going to show you how to get right to the root of uh oh what they call it here the mounting distance is the distance the bottom of this with the shim to the top of here so next we're going to take the pending note get the bearing off and we're going to measure from the top to the bottom and that'll give us the mounting distance of the pinion in this particular rear end so Gonna Knock the pinion out of this and uh we'll be back so we've got an interesting turn of events here I pulled the pinion out and I removed the bearing from it I was actually able to you you can tell I'm not trying to use it over again it came off in one piece right when you're throwing stuff away they come off they come apart easy normally the Shem on most differentials will be sitting right here and it sets in between the bearing and opinion okay now this throws a screw up into the video but I'm going to roll with it anyway normally what we'd be doing and I'm just going to pretend this is the shim even though it doesn't fit here normally what we would be doing to get the remainder of our pinion depth is we would measure from the shim stock to the face of the pinion so hopefully that's in frame there for you guys but and then we would take this measurement and we would add it to our our checking distance that we've already got where's my mouse here uh our checking distance was uh 2.813 [Music] so if we took this and add it this distance here to our checking distance of we would end up with almost another two inches just we're we're 90 89 thousandths under two inches but I'm not going to add it up but well I will add it up so give me just a second here uh we got 1911. one two eight one three and 1911. of course I got to put my Dussel points in 2 4 17. so if we were looking for our actual mounting distance on this here what we're doing is we're measuring the distance from the face of this bearing that sets in here to the face to the center line of the axle I've got you guys way screwed up here so we're our mounting distance is measured from this surface here that sets in the bearing to the center line of the axle so from here to the center line of this screwdriver which is the center line of the axle approximately because I'm just holding things that there would be 4.724 [Music] now the thing they did here it's actually nice because if any of you guys have to take one of these bearings off to change this shim you usually end up throwing away a sixty dollar bearing because you've destroyed it okay so this here is press fit on here I'm going to show you a little trick I hope I still got you this is press fit on here so what you can do is if you get this bearing off in one piece just going to step on a screen here you can take and mount this up in your vise and take a a sanding it's not a desk I guess a rotary sander and you can take and you can work this now it it is going to take some time but it's worth the time okay you sand this until it's a fit on here okay onto your new pinion the reason being is if the shim lived okay I keep on getting the other screen you sand this until you have a slit thick the suppressed fat so it won't go on yet but if you had your shim living in here and you put this all together and you do your paint pattern on your gear and you don't like what you see you got to take it all apart and you got to pull this bearing off again so if you're able to save a good bearing sand it until it's slip fit with your shim in there you put it all together you set your preload you do everything you do your gear pattern and if it's good all you got to do is replace this bearing because it needs to be pressed fed okay bearings are manufactured to very close tolerances and they usually don't screw them up as long as you're buying good bearings so don't buy the Chinese ones buy the good ones okay but the nice thing about this setup I'm just going to set that on like this is this bearing fits in the housing here okay press fit again the shim lives on top here so if the readings are wrong when I do my paint test pattern all I've got to do is pull this out I don't need to disassemble this pinion and ruin a good bearing I punch this bearing back out of the housing and I can adjust this [Music] but this here is showing a little bit of wear in it there's nothing really out of the surface it's just Gray so one thing you could do is when you're setting this up we've got all our measurements we've got our checking distance which is the distance from here to the center line of the axle now we know our measurements and we don't need to do all the math over again okay we've got a checking distance and we knew our distance from the top of this to the surface of this was 4.941 so our next differential we can put the pinion in we can check the distance from here to this surface and it should be 4.941 plus or minus whatever the new pinion is marked on here this pinion does not have any markings usually they'll Mark the up here with a plus or minus one to four and sometimes I'll also Mark them here on the shaft and this here does not have any markings whatsoever of course the manufacturers they've got their million dollars worth of tools that they can put on this and set it up but we don't want to buy all those tools and we don't want to pay the dealer to do this so by putting this together in the differential now it's not pressed together so bear with me here if I took my new pinion assembly shove it in here and I can measure from here to here with my straight edge again and I'm after that 491 4. okay and that is one of the most important measurements to take when you're changing opinion bird because I have seen opinion Burns be a different thickness in the air don't know why you read the numbers on the bearing which this one is all worn off and I can't read so I couldn't compare them anyway but you read the numbers on the bearing you read the numbers under replacement and the height of that bearing sitting in the cone can be different but if we were just doing a bearing change on this differential okay this is really screwed up they said it was an accident I think this one blew up because there's also a case damage to it so but they gave me the thing so I could do this video so I'm not going to complain Okay so Screwballs thrown at us here doing this uh like I was saying uh 90 of the differentials have the shim uh between the pinion head and the bearing itself this has the shim between the bearing cup and the case it does the exact same thing it's just a different setup uh it's actually a better setup so it's maybe they're going to start changing them but irregardless it still gives you the same idea of the importance of measuring that pinion depth and the most important one to take is a measurement from your straight edge into the end of the pinion because you're going to compare that to the replacement pinion or the same pinion if you're just doing bearings if you're just doing bearings you want to get that exact same measurement so that's that's the whole gold of this uh if you get the pinion set as far as setting up the differential for uh the uh preload and backlash uh that's pretty simple uh there's been a lot of videos on that showing how to put a pinion in but they don't get a lot into the basic tools and that's what I wanted to show you guys today was you don't need to go out and buy an 800 pinion depth tool by Yukon Axel or the genuine Chevy Dodge Ford tools or whatever you're working on you can take some basic measurements with some basic tools so like a venue caliper a depth micrometer would be great but I didn't use my depth micrometer because a lot of people don't have that and I wanted to do it with a straight edge and a six inch vignette scale and that way a lot of people have those tools in their dual box and I want to make it simple stupid really and I'm trying to do that I've got a couple still pictures I'll put I've already got one in the video and I'll put another one at the end of this video I thank you for your time please subscribe like comment share uh the last video I did on solar head resurfacing uh really woke up my sight I got over approximately 150 subscribers since I made that video and I've got over I think around 1200 views on that video and that's just in a couple weeks and that's been a real wake up for my site I didn't expect to get that and I'm very thankful for it uh I hope the site continues to grow because uh then I can get to a point where it pays me to make these videos so I can share my knowledge I'm an old man been doing this a long time and there are a lot of stuff up in this gray area and I'd like to share it with some of the people that are starting out or trying to fight their way through the economic Times you got to try to fix your own stock because who can afford to bring a vehicle to someone like me uh working here I'm half the price of a dealership but that's still it still costs so uh if I can help you guys learn how to do this great but uh please like And subscribe share and uh have a good day thank you very much

Channel: Acme Machining

Views: 64,491

Keywords:

Id: TpMiEPYK9g8

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023