I was driving home this week and just as i turned onto my street i heard a loud pop from the rear followed by some loud rattling. i knew it was bad right away. i thought it was a wheel bearing cause the sound seemed to come from one side more than the other. it wasn't the bearing so i pulled the rear cover and this is what i saw. I've never even heard of this before. I managed to sheer the heads of 4 of the bolts on the ring gear. the rear is a 9bolt with 3.27 gears and disc brakes. my question is what could make this happen? is it possible my posi locked up and the bolts were the weakest link? if its bad i don't want to reuse it if i rebuild the rear. If i buy a new rear i don't want to sell someone a bad part. any help is appreciated.

 

usually bolts dont just brake for no reason. do you have all the teeth on the ring and pinion gears? did any parts from the posi come out and jam, causing the heads to break? the one bolt looks like it stripped out. maybe it was stripped and fell out and jammed against the otherc causing the failure. i havent seen that before either. sucks....

 

Wow, that really is bizarre! Just when you think you've seen every way to grenade a rear end. Yeah, I'd say just make sure the threads are still good in all the ring gear holes, check out all the other internals really good, and use RED loctite on the new ring gear bolts and torque them to proper specs. As long as none of the internals got damaged, and you replace all the ring gear bolts with a new set, I don't see any particular reason why you'd have a repeat of the same situation. Usually excessive backlash or worn out bearings cause teeth to break off, not the ring gear bolts!