Hey guys,

I'm having to rebuild the rear on my 84 T/A and replace the ring and pinion. I've got 28 spline axles and a Zexel Torsen diff in it. I just picked up a Richmond mega rebuild kit along with a solid pinion spacer because everyone seems to like them. My problem is, the shop here in England has never seen a solid pinion spacer and doesn't know how to set it up right because it's not "factory" and they can't look it up. Can anyone give me some info on how to set it up vs. a crush sleeve? I've never done a rear myself so I'm only going off what I've read here on the boards. The installation instructions are included and talk about using the shimms to help measure but any help from experienced people would be greatly appreciated!

 

Easiest way to get it right, is to put it together with all the shims, and measure the end play. Then take that much shim out, and re-measure. Once all the end play is gone, decrease the amount of shim IN SMALL INCREMENTS until the desired pinion preload is reached; should be around 20-25 in-lbs. This should be measured without the pinion seal in place. The shims should be stacked between the spacer and the tail bearing; i.e. put the spacer on the gear, stack up shims, slide the tail bearing on, slide the yoke on, tighten the nut. When complete the nut can be torqued as tight as they want: I use about a 3' breaker bar with a 1¼" socket, and about a 4' piece of steel bar stock with 2 holes along the edge to bolt to one of the yoke ears. I would estimate that I get about 250 ft-lbs on the nut without breaking a sweat.

The shims they supply are in several thicknesses, no 2 the same, such that by using various combinations of them, you can get a total thickness over a range from about .015" up to around .075" with a resolution of around .002" or so.

 

easiest way I have found to do it is set it up with a normal crush sleave, take it apart, measure the thickness of the crush sleave then put it together with the correct thickness solid spacer.

 

That's providing you have the original crush sleeve and the preload was correct with the sleeve.

Sofa's way is the best. Excess spacers to make it loose allows you to measure how much needs to be removed to get zero endplay. Small amounts are then remove to get proper preload. It's time consuming but once it's done, there's zero chance of ever having problems.

Personally, I doubt a solid crush sleeve is really required for a 7.5" diff. The main purpose is that under acceleration, the pinion wants to go out the front and the ring want to go out the back of the diff. If there's enough force to push the pinion out the front, there's a possibility that it could crush the crush sleeve even more and remove the preload. Of course to do this it also needs to crush the inner bearing. A solid crush sleeve prevents that. I think if you can get enough force for a 7.5" diff to push the pinion forward that much, the teeth on the ring and pinion will probably fail first.

The nice thing about the solid crush sleeve is that it's reusable. If you decide to do a gear swap later on, you can set up the pinion preload again. Just don't throw out the extra shims.

 

Thanks guys, that really helped. I showed what you said to the mechanic and he said he's got it and that it made it pretty clear for him. Here's to hoping he can figure it out! lol