Well, I thought I had some worn out rear brakes starting to grind.. had a slight rubbing/grinding sound for a little while.. then today I noticed a knocking/clunking sound coming from the rear.. it was bad enough that I could feel it a little..

so this afternoon I jacked the car up and took off the wheels.. took off the brake drums and it turns out my pads weren't worn out.. so that's not where the grinding was coming from.. while it was jacked up, I put it in drive and let it spin up.. it got to about 45mph, then I slowed it down, and as I slowed it down it had a rough grinding sound.. the hubs stopped spinning, but for about two seconds afterwards, there was still a spinning/grinding sound.. any ideas? it's a open differential if that makes any difference.

I couldn't tell exactly where the knocking sound was coming from.. it didn't do it any when I jacked it up.. earlier today it did it while I was driving down the highway with no change in speed... just knocking every 5-10 seconds.. did it more though while accellerating from a stop.. any ideas on this one?

also, how much rotational play should there be between the driveshaft and transmission? I've got quite a bit of play (rotates 15-20 degrees) ... it just feels kinda loose to me.. I couldn't tell that there was any noise coming from there when it was jacked up in gear though.. so I don't think that's any part of the problems above..

thanks for any help.

 

bah. doesn't matter now, I blew the damn thing up

 

 

the rear.. the engine will never die.. doesn't put out enough power to cause any wear

 

Oh man, i am having the exact same problem, it was like i had typed that myself.

Any ideas what it was?

 

broke a tooth on the pinion gear and stripped several of the ring gear...I'm assuming the clunking noise I had was the broken part of the tooth trying to go in between the gears.. from the time I noticed some noise coming from it, until the time it finally died was about a week and a half... so, if that's what your problem is, get ready.

 

... why does this sometimes happen? you go to reply to a message, and when you hit submit, it just sits there like you clicked on a dead link.. then brings up the page not found screen, BUT, your reply goes through, but if you look at the list of threads, it doesn't say there's a new reply OR even say you're the last poster... anyway, it just happened here... guess I'm just BTT'ing it for Mr. Burd. heh