A friend just blew his diff, I'm going to take a look at it tonight after work. what usually breaks on our 10bolts? If the spider gears go, do you lose both wheels? his is an open end dif.
I'm just hoping that if he lost his center gears it might be an easy fix by replacing them with another set or with an E-Z locker/powertrax setup...

 

All the gears in our rears are w-e-a-k weak. Pinion, ring, spider, they all break in these rears. Just pull the cover and you'll have your answer, no point in playing guessing games

 

i grenaged a 10 bolt in my 97ws6 trans am at the track . ripped 7 teth off the ring gear and 3 off the pinion gear... oh ya i was at the end of my run too. rear locked up and i went spinning. i still ran a 13.2 @104mph though

 

If you do alot of one-wheeled burnouts, the spider gears wear out pretty fast--mine were worn sharp when I removed them. The ring gear is also fairly weak since it's not very big. A common problem I've seen is the start to leak without anyone seeing the leak, then it runs out/low of fluid, then it self-destructs. Measure how much fluid you get when you pull the cover.

 

I BLEW THE RING & PINION TO BITS.

 

They're all weak.

I blew the posi in mind 'cause I had the gears set up for strength (yes, they whine on decel). The previous set of gears on the posi chipped 3 teeth on the ring gear.

7.5"/7.625" 10-bolts are pieces of crap.

 

lower gear ratio gear sets like 3.32 and 3.73 and 4.11 etc are weaker, mainly because of how frickin smal the pinion head diameter is, that means less tooth contact patch between teeth of ring and teeth of pinion, compared to contract patch of higher ratios sets where the gears are closer to same diameter ansd teeth will intermesh alot more

tradeoffs, tradeoffs, speed = weaker

 

dude is the luckiest guy, the person who put the diff together earlier, only put 3 center gears in
he ended up shattering the other top gear, nicked up his pinion gear a little bit too, he just wanted to put new spiders in and keep runnin it.
so i slapped it together with some old spiders.