Can anybody tell me if the 9-bolt Rear Axle contain C-Clips?
We recently had our 9-bolt rebuilt, and we are having problems. We think they may have forgot to re-install the c-clips which helps hold the rear axle in place. We did some research and some rear axles do not have C-clips.

Does anybody(anybody who have rebuilt a 9bolt would know), know if the 9bolt rear axle contains C-Clips or not when you rebuild them?

Thanks,

 

No..9-bolt rears Do Not use "C" clips to hold the axle shafts in, they are bolted on.

 

The axle bearings have pressed on retainers that keep the bearings in place.
There is a metal retainer plate that holds the axles in the housing.

 

Similar to a Ford 9" or a Dana 44.

 

The '9-bolt" is like a Dana 44, because the 9-bolt is a Dana axle....The M78.

 

What exactily is the problem you are having?

 

I don't think Dana and Borg Warner are the same company...
BW makes the 9 bolt = M78.

 

We got the the 9bolt rear end rebuilt using 9bolt.com parts, new posi carrier, "used" 3.27 gearset, and new bearing kit from 9bolt. Also bought ratechs complete rebuilt kit. The people at the performance shop rebuilt the rear axle.
first thing i noticed was a shake in the drivetrain when it went into over drive around 40mph-60mph. But this was livable. the bad thing was a bad noise when i pulled into my driveway, a clinging sound and a vibration. almost as if the tires were rubbing. you could hear it backing up and pulling forward in the driveway.
I let the car sit for a week, so my dad and I could debug it...
I thought it woudl make the sound at first, but it did not, so we took car for a spin. Car seemed to drive fine for 30 minutes. Then when I turned at lower speeds around 15mph, it seems like maybe the axle or maybe the wheel somewhat turned(slid out of place?). When we pulled into driveway, the sound came back, very bad clinging sound, and you could feel something vibrating. Kinda as the back wheel turned, cling, cling, cling.
My dad said he could see the rear axle or tire sorta look like it was bending or the wheel is shifting out of place or something.
We plan to bring car back to the shop next week to see what they think it might be.
my dad was thinking maybe they forgot to put the c-clips back in, but come to find it does not have any. So now my dad says maybe they didn't put the bearings in correctly? SO I don't know.
I know i'm nearly 2000 invested. and My rear axle still not running right.
If this does not work, i'll be looking for a used rear axle.

 

If they forgot the bearing retainer rings, you may have an axle moving in and out of the tube.
If you have **** brakes it will keep the axle in place.
If you have drums it could come right out.

Pull the wheel and brakes and look to see if the axles show signs of moving in and out.

If your posi carrier cones are really tight it may clunk when turning sharp corners slowly. This is ok and not a concern.

Check your pinion nut to see if it's tight if you are now noticing a vibration, unlikely , but you never know. Mark your driveshaft Ujoint cups and pinion when pulling it and install it 180deg in the other direction (at the rear U Joint) it might help the vibration.

For 2k you could have a 12bolt or 9 inch!

 

Thanks for the input. I appreciate it.

 

BW bought out Dana so.........

"The Borg Warner 9 Bolt Rearend is actually called the M78 Rearend or "78 series". It has been made since the late 60's in Australia by a company called BTR Engineering Ltd. BTR was bought out by Borg-Warner under which company name the rears were produced for our cars. In the last few years Borg-Warner was bought out by Dana Corp. and the rears are still produced by Dana today in the same BTR factory under the "Spicer Axles Australia" name."

 

what do you mean liveable? you paid for a product to be put together. from what you said you put some money into that rear end. nothing liveable about a rear end you describe even if it was only the problem you initially talked about.
now take it back and tell them it is not acceptable and to do it right.

 

EITHER WAY take it back to the shop and have them fix their mistake. Is that 2000 total project invested or just for the rearend work?

 

I'd bet that your posi is binding up, does it when turning around corners right? You HAVE to use a special lubricant additive only available from a GM dealer for a GM posi rear end. It's just a few ounces, sorry I don't have the part number anymore.

 

You'll find MANY people (search here on TGO) use NO additive, and are perfectly happy.

I was looking through this same issue this afternoon, since I moved my car & found a small puddle of gear oil.....

Anyways, I looked it up in my GTAs GM Factory Service Manual (the one mechanics use in the dealerships). It makes NO mention of any additive, for the cone clutch 9-bolt. Just GM part #1050010 lubricant.

 

"liveable" meant it bothered me at first, but if that was the only thing wrong with it, that i might could live with it.

the shop is towing my car in today. will keep every1 updated becuase if i spent 2000 on it, and it does not work out, i want everyone to know about it.
the 2000, half of it was parts. My total came to about 925 shipped from 9 bolts, then i had to buy a complete rebuild kit from ratech which was about 140. Then bouschillon performance rebuilt it, it was about 600 labor, but added another 250 becuase my transmission cable broke, and we decided to let them fix that too, but in hindsite the transmission cable did not look that bad when we saw it, so they kinda did us wrong there, but the more important thing right now is getting the rear axle running correctly.
wish me luck. again. if it does not work out, i'll be in the market for a used rear axle(which so far in hindsite, should have gone this way, it would have been much cheaper).
Oh yeah, they said the same thing, to use limited slip additive oil, we tried that yesterday, it did not fix the problem. it's binding or whatever after driving it, heating it up, and pulling into my driveway, whether turning or not.
My dad thinks maybe they didn't do that "shim" thing right, maybe they made it too tight or something?
Guess hopefully we will see. The bad thing is, when they look at it, will they live up to it if they see they did something wrong? that's a big question too. becuase if they admit to it, then theyshould fix it for free. but mechanic shops do not make money by being honest, just hope they are honest type people.
elsewise, they can tell me something is wrong w/my posi unit, and since 1 of the parts i bought was "used", the gear set thing from 9 bolt, they didnt have any new, only thing they had for a 3.27 ratio was "excellent condition" "used". I'm not sure, but he might say since i brought "used" parts, even the rest of the parts i got was "new", he may say he can not gaurantee it type thing, dunno, we'll see....

Sincerely,

 

The unfortunate thing is you're right about used parts. Alot of shops wouldn't touch it bcause of that. BUT they should have xplained the possible set backs B4 doing the job so you could decide if you wanted to take another approach to getting it done. ALSO when they set the ring & pinion gear backlash, they would've seen binding, then should've let you know the situation. I do hope this works out for you without $pending more! Best of luck to you!

 

Your noise is not due to a used gearset!
Don't use the posi lube additive. You don't want those cones slipping or they'll wear out too fast.
PM me your email and I'll send you the GM 9 bolt manual and the posi come repair 'shim' info. Tighter is better.

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/tran...-use-posi.html

 

my email is turbo409@aol.com. Thanks. btw: they picked up car today. got our fingers crossed.

 

Got a update ,
they said the posi 9bolt.com sent me was bad. they said there was metal shaving type stuff on the inside.
so we decided they will put my old posi back into it, they said that will at least make my car drivable.
Were gonna try to see if we can get our money back for the 9bolt"new" posi carrier 3 series thing, but really what I want is to see if they'll swap me for a "new" one? I dunno, maybe they accidentally sent me a used bad one?
Dealing with a foreign country sucks, now i have send glenn at 9 bolt.com an email and wait 24 hrs and see if he replies back.
I asked if the could take the cones off the "new" bad one ,and put them on my old posi? But the shop said they didn't want to get into that. they said they would if it was a ford or something.
you can kind of tell i dont really know what i'm talking about.

 

Shim your old one up before you toss it in per the info I sent you!
You likely didn't even need the new unit. You can machine your old cones down on the small side if they are bottoming out. Shim the spider gears and you have a unit as good as new.

 

Thanks bro.

 

updates?

 

bouschillon performance put my old posi back in, and so now the car is at least drivable. (I have to drive it easy, no full throttle punches from stand-still). So it does so far seem that the new posi i got from 9bolt was a defective.
I shipped the "new" bad posi unit back to 9bolt.com. I'm waiting to hear full fullback from them. They need to verify the unit as defective before shipping me a replacement posi.
If they do send me a replacement posi, which they should, i'll plan on having that one installed. it costed me about 300 to reinstall my old posi, so i'm guessing it will cost another 300 to install the replacement posi if and when they ship it to me.
shipping is expensive to ship to/from austrailia. I paid 167 to ship to them, which 9bolt said they will reinburse me.
It's a shame cuz reason why i bought "new" was to avoid these types of problems.
so far i spent close to 2000: here it is: 725 9 bolt parts(new posi, used 3.27 ring gear, complete bearing kit), 180 shipping, 140 ratech complete rebuild kit(apparent i didn't have the bearings needed), 600 labor to install, 100 misc parts, then it was 300 to put my old posi back in total w/misc parts. So thats 725+180+140+600+100+300=2045? And I paid 167 shipping that I hope to get reimbursed. Hopefully they will send me a replacement posi. Then I'll pay another 300 to have it installed. So IF i'm lucky and all that works out, I'll be 2350 invested. But so far I'm 2050 invested, and at least my car is drivable and runs pretty well. The car ran smooth w/my old posi between 40-60mph, so to me that was another thing saying something was wrong w/the posi they sent me.
In hindsite, I had no idea I would be having to pay near 2000 to fix it this way. I would have shopped for a used rear axle. Maybe go to a 10bolt. Not only the money invested, but alot of time. I had a difficult time trying to come up with all the parts needed to rebuilt my axle. It felt like 9bolts parts list was incomplete, I didn't have all the bearings I needed or whatever. Then trying to figure Ratech's complete rebuilt kit w/bearings, and why the bearing part numbers did not match, apparently not all of Ratech's complete kit had all the correct bearings needed either. My shop said they had to pick from both kits to come up w/what they needed. It's been a real pain. I took both kits to the shop and told them hopefully that's everything you need, and to order whatever you do need if something is missing. At first they said I had the wrong bearings, but then said that I did have everything pretty much they needed between the 2 kits.
This is the update so far.

 

I think we finally got the 9bolt rear axle fixed. We had to return the 1st one I got from 9bolt.com. It turned out to be a manufacturer defect.
I traded emails with Glenn at 9bolt.com and asked if he was going to work w/me on this, and he did.
I had to ship the defective 9bolt back to Glenn, costed me 167 shipping, he looked at it, it did look defective to him as well (it had metal shavings inside of the posi).
He shipped me back a rebuilt posi that he built himself and said he "knows" that it's a good one, I took the part he sent me, he also sent me some extra bearings which was good becuase I think the performance shop I took it to used them.
This time, my car turned out ok. I've had it for about a month now almost, it seems to be doing fine.
I had to pay the perfance shop initially 600 labor 1st time, then 300 next time to put old posi back in it, then another 300 to put this last posi. I havent added everything up, but its somewhere betweeen 2000-2500 before i was done! It took me a long time to, trying to research all the part numbers I needed, trying to verify 1 source list with another, and wondering why each kit had different part#'s and seemed incomplete.... But guess I'm glad I got my car running again finally.
oh, 9bolt did reimburse me 330, for the shipping, and also the price difference between the "new" posi, and the "rebuilt" posi. So that helped me some, but I think it was sorta a loss for both of us on this transaction.
725 initial parts(new posi, used ring gear, bearing kit), 180 initial shipping, 130 ratech complete kit, 600 first labor, 100-200 misc parts oil bolts etc,, 300 2nd labor, 300 3rd labor. ~2300........ but in the end i'm glad its running strong again.

 

I read above a recommendation to use limited slip additive? That stuff is used in clutch pack type LSDs like eatons and Danas. It's a bandaid to eliminate hammering clutches from too much spring preload and improperly shimmed spider gears (something easily fixed by throwing away the springs and posi tuning the spiders for proper clearance and relying on the spiders themselves to load up the clutches when posi action is needed)

Anyway, if you do use limited slip additive (it's a friction modifier, it promotes clutch slippage) the cones will wear out much faster. A shop put additive in my posi before I owned it...you'll get a hue of metal particles in the oil in no time. A perfect way to quickly wear out the case and cones.

 

Thanks for the bad news(for me). The first time the shop put in the new posi, they did not use friction modifier, but when I complained about it clucking, their first try to fix it was to use it (but problem ended up being posi itself)., then 2nd time & 3rd last time, they did put on the receipt they put friction modifier in it.....

Can anybody confirm what he is saying, that "limited slip" additive, ie: "friction modifier" is bad for these posi's????
I'm pretty sure I heard mixed opinions on that, but if its true, I'll want to replace my fluid with something else w/out additive....
I'm gonna ask Glenn at 9bolt.com to see what he thinks as well...
Thanks again for the bad news lol.

 

Glad to hear the good news! It is obvious both the shop & 9bolt are standing behind their work & their products!
I'm going to look @ the site for 9bolt tonight or tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing your experience.

 

I have to admit I was worried that 9bolt would not stand behind their work, becuase it ended up being a losing situation for both of us. And I was dealing on a email basis with a foreign country. Yes I was thankful that he was willing to work with me on the situation. In hindsite, I was glad I got bouchilon performance shop to do the work, becuase had I got my dad to do it, they probably would have blamed my dad for improper install that messed up the posi. So it was good I paid for "professional" people to have it done.

 

actually the 9 bolt is made by Borg and Warner.. not Dana co.

 

FYI....
"
The Borg Warner 9 Bolt Rearend is actually called the M78 Rearend or "78 series". It has been made since the late 60's in Australia by a company called BTR Engineering Ltd. BTR was bought out by Borg-Warner under which company name the rears were produced for our cars. In the last few years Borg-Warner was bought out by Dana Corp. and the rears are still produced by Dana today in the same BTR factory under the "Spicer Axles Australia" name."