Hey, got myself into a little issue with my t5 5 speed Borg Warner Camaro. I was doing a little pull, and after I revved out 1st I put it into second let off the clutch and hear a loud pop. Now none of the gears work, including reverse. The car still runs fine. When its in gear and I give it some gas with the clutch out, the speedometer also goes up with an odd electric buzzing sort of sound. If anyone would be able to point me in the right direction that what be great. Clearly, the trans is going to come out but would like any advice I can get before getting into it. Please and Thank you very much

 

Does 4th still work?

 

4th does not work. I have tried all of the gears and reverse. Nothing works

 

If the speedo works, then the whole transmission is still turning.

Something behind the transmission is broke. Drive shaft yoke, DS itself, gears, etc.

When you got up under the car and ACTUALLY LOOKED, what did you see?

 

Now that would be to obvious

 

Both myself and my dad looked under. Neither of us see anything out of the ordinary. We have been under the car many many times so we would be able to see if there was something

 

Go jack it up, put it in gear, and see if the driveshaft is turning.

 

you need to look at the driveshaft while car is stopped, running in gear,and speedo is showing speed-if driveshaft is turning and wheels are not,trouble is in the differential-probably a spider gear problem.

 

Another thing that could happen-especially if this car has had a habit of spinning in circles generating smoke,is c-clip falling out and axle spline coming disengaged from differential side gear-whole axle will come out some and wheel offset will be visable along with exposed brake shoe.C-clip,axle ends,and spider pin need to be worn for c-clip dropout and axle disengagement to occur..Will not happen with the optional rear disc brakes.

 

We have now looked underneath while it’s in gear, the drive shaft spins so it must be the rear dif, like you guys said. (You all really know what you’re talking about) Thank everyone who said anything. Anymore advice would be great. I am sure I will have more questions once we start taking everything apart. Thank you guys again.

 

So we opened the diff and we found two small springs. An entire gear in pieces, small. Two flat pieces. The main large gear has a chuck taken out of it. When we spin the wheels the drive shaft spins, as well as the other wheel (posi). There are metal pieces everywhere inside. It seems as though we need to replace everything in there because almost everything is damaged. Tell me what you think. Please and Thank you.

 

You have discovered the weak part of GM vehicles. Now you have a hard expensive decision to make. Cheapest way is find a used differential assy. and swap the whole rear. Then you can live groundhog day as this might be a reoccurring situation. Or you can upgrade which is the expensive but do it once route.

 

Spider gears broke-if the ring gear has a piece broken off,basicly need to rebuild the rear axle-ring and pinion,carrier(the big iron chunk that houses the spider gears,ring gear bolts to).and bearingsThe rear end used on most 3rd gens is known as GM 7.5 and used on a lot of ~1977-04 GM RWD cars and trucks including G-bodys,F cars through '02 and s-trucks. Any salvaged parts or whole rear axles should be looked over good before install 1984 cars could have inch or metric brake line fittings. I think all 5-speed camaros with the 5.0l H.O. came with 3.75 ratio gears,don't know about the standard 150hp 305.If a carrier is taken from a 1990-up rear axle,1990-92 axles will need to be used.

 

That used to be an Auburn posi. (the stock version of it) Total POS from the get-go. Good riddance except for the $$$ factor.

If your gears are still OK enough to use, which depending on how they're damaged they might still be, you can buy a new carrier and swap that in there. I'd recommend new axles and bearings regardless. And of course new carrier bearings and shims: don't try to re-use the stock shims, they are cast iron, and inevitably are severely worn on the driver's side where the ring & pinion load them. Replacement ones are steel, and come in a set with 2 .100" thick ones for each side, which you then stack up thinner ones in the kit to set the backlash. Usually takes anywhere from .230" to .260" total on each side.

The HO cars came with 3.42 or 3.73 in 84. Most of the 84 auto cars had 3.42 and the stick ones 3.73 butt there are exceptions both ways. 83, 85, & 86 5-speed cars all had 3.73s. Most of the LG4 cars came with 3.23 that year AFAIK... one of my little brothers had a 84 Z28 LG4 auto equipped that way.

Finding a whole rear with decent gears is not going to be easy. If you do go that route, try to find a 89-up, so that it comes with the better disc brakes. The highest gear you'll find in any of those from the factory is 3.42, and those were only in a very few TPI 305/5-spd cars, the ones w G92. More than likely you'll be swapping out gears in any rear you use, either your existing one or some other, if yours are too far gone.

 

Hey its been awhile. We have all of the parts and have been trying to figure it out. When we put the pinion in there is a lot of play, it wiggles forwards and back. We put everything in how it was when we took it out, but new. Using the same amount of shims. Then, took it out and put a third shim in between the pinion head and the large bearing. There was still play.

We have come to the belief that maybe there should be shim with the race in that same bearing, the large one by the pinion head. Maybe there should be a shim in the small one instead. We have not experimented with either yet.

I feel as though we are messing everything up more and more each time we take it in and out. Help is definitely needed.

Here is a video of the wiggle. Our methods of putting the small bearing in, which is closer to the drive shaft in is clearly not very professional. (Hence the piece of steel and wood)

Any ideas for anything would be more than great. Please and thank you.

 

New pinion and ring gear ? Depth was set after measuring depth ? Then bearing preload with a crush sleeve ?

 

This is where you hone out the ID of the smaller pinion bearing to use for pinion depth setup.
Then once you obtain the correct measurement, you then install the new bearing.

It will take a couple of gorillas with a 3/4" drive (or larger) breaker bar and a 6 foot cheater piece of pipe to compress the crush sleeve.
No pneumatic impact guns - you have to sneak up on the proper bearing preload.

 

Sneak up on the crush sleeve and give it a good scare 😆

 

-or better yet swap the crush sleeve with a properly shimmed solid sleeve.Are parts installed brand new or taken from another axle assembly? And what carrier and ratio did you end up with? With some posi carrier designs,as cones wear,axle gears come out of mesh with the spider gears-increasing chance of poor mesh and breakage...

 

Yeah, only problem is, you haven't begun to crush the crush sleeve yet.

THIMK about how bearings work. For a quick lesson, consider your front wheel bearings. They're EXACTLY the same thing as pinion bearings, except that in FWBs, the shaft sits still and the housing around it (aka rotor) spins, where in PBs, the housing sits still and the shaft spins. Other than that, same same same.

In both cases, you have outer races that press into the housing; 2 tapered roller sets in cages, made onto an inner race; a giant nut on the shaft, that you tighten down to just the right point to preload the bearings as needed; and some retention method to hold the nut still.

In the case of FWBs, a cotter pin is used to keep the nut from backing off. They used to do the same thing to pinion nuts back in the days of 50 HP 6-cyl motors that couldn't turn over 2500 RPM. Problem became, once they started using V8 motors with hundreds of HP and that could go TWICE that RPM or more, the cotter pin became the weak link. The last GM rear I know of that used one was the mid 50s "classic" Chevy trucks; which were well and widely known even back then for shearing the cotter pin and the nut backing off and the pinion getting sucked into the case and crashing against the carrier and locking the whole thing up solid. Usually happened to people when they were backing down a steep hill like their driveway. So another method had to be invented. No kind of "locknut" can possibly generate enough holding power; certainly not a Nyloc, butt not even a distorted-bore nut. Even cutting a slot or slots in the shaft and staking the nut into the slot isn't good enough.

The solution they came up with was the crush sleeve. All the mfrs adopted this system. I don't know who invented it butt I'm sure it was patented and licensed since all the mfrs did it exactly the same at about the same time, so probably Dana or B-W or somebody like that introduced it. The way it works is, there's a sleeve between the bearing inner races, that's got a sort of bulge to it; then as the big nut gets tightened enough, it begins to crush the sleeve, which bulges out more, butt because of the direction that the force is applied to it (trying to stretch out the metal in the outer part of the bulge) it can hold quite a bit of tension. So, you tighten the nut, which takes only a tiny little force to compress the sleeve, maybe 150 - 200 ft-lbs of torque; tightening the nut crushes the sleeve; the torque is held on the nut in the form of the nut being tight against the sleeve, which deforms as the nut is tightened further; and you keep tightening until the sleeve is crushed until the bearings are pressed together until the correct preload on them is reached. Then the tension of the crush sleeve holds the nut still, because the nut has however much torque on it, against the distortion of the sleeve. Sounds great in theory, anyway.

This is the part you haven't accomplished yet, which is why the pinion is free to flop around in the housing. You've got the nut run down with your ¼" drive nutdriver handle to where the sleeve is stopping it from going any further, but you haven't even begun to crush it yet, let alone crushed it to the point where the play is all taken up and the bearings are properly preloaded.

Anyway, it works great until it doesn't. As we often say, in theory, theory and practice are the same, butt in practice, they might not be. Anyway, the basic system fails in 2 ways: 1, as the bearings wear, the preload goes away, just like any other preloaded pair of tapered roller bearings; and 2, if the crush sleeve EVER crushes ANY further, the nut is instantly free to turn again, because now it's not tight against anything, so it immediately backs off. Funny thing about that... hardware rarely tightens itself when it's unrestrained, it always loosens. Kinda like how all the dirt that gets on white things is black, butt all the dirt that gets on black things is white, even if the 2 things are sitting right next to each other surrounded by the same bulk dirt. The Real World is a giant conspiracy and they're all out to get us.

Consider the forces along the axis of the pinion. When you're in a forward gear, the force between the ring and the pinion is trying to push the pinion forward, out of the pumpkin. There's this great big "head" bearing (think of the pinion as like a tadpole with a head and a tail) with its outer race that's solidly mounted into the pumpkin, and the inner race equally solidly up against the face of the gear part of it, and all that is carrying the full load of pushing the car around. The "tail" bearing is just kinda along for the ride; there's no real force on it, other than the preload which is negligible compared to the force the engine is putting on the head bearing, and the force of holding the drive shaft straight. No drive force is applied to it. (which is why the tail bearing is so much smaller than the head bearing; it carries only a fraction of the load, normally) That all changes when you put it in reverse, or even, just take your foot off the gas and coast. Then, the force along the pinion is reversed, and the gears are trying to suck the pinion into the pumpkin, which loads the tail bearing, butt more importantly ... surprise! surprise! ... tries to crush the crush sleeve some more. If it EVER succeeds in doing so, even just a tiny bit, then the nut is instantly no longer tight against it, and it's free to turn, and it WILL back off. Every time. Now of course we're not supposed to drive at full power in reverse, and coasting is a pretty light load on everything, butt it's NOT zero, meaning, there's always a chance that the crush sleeve deal will fail and the nut will back off. Worse yet, when the bearings wear and get slop in them, everything in there bangs back and forth like a hammer when the force along the pinion shaft changes direction, which is almost CERTAIN to start the nut-unloading process.

A solid spacer with selectable shims overcomes that weakness. It allows you to select the exact right thickness of spacer, corresponding to the crush sleeve being crushed to the right width, so that the bearings are preloaded correctly; butt then, it allows you keep on tightening the nut, to MUCH greater torque than that little weenie 150 - 200 ft-lbs a crush sleeve requires (remember, your engine is putting 400 ft-lbs or whatever, times the gear reduction in the transmission, on everything, so 150 ft-lbs is a drop in the bucket compared to even "normal" operating loads let alone "abuse"), if you want to apply it. And even better, IT NEVER CRUSHES ANY FURTHER, meaning the nut never gets a chance to back off.

Butt however all that may be, you have ALOT of tightening yet to do, before it's ready to do ANYTHING else with.

Meanwhile, ANOTHER weakness of the crush sleeve system is, you have to take it all apart, throw away the sleeve, and start over, if you're going to try to use "pattern" to set up the gears. Personally I don't bother; I've never been able to read "patterns" worth a crap anyway (not least because I'm too stuuuupid for something complicated like that), and because I don't like to keep a whole bin full of crush sleeves on hand for every rear axle I work on. Well, believe it or don't, the factory most likely doesn't use "pattern" EITHER; it would be INCREDIBLY labor-intensive (translation: COSTLY) and error-prone, in their environment. They need to be able to pick up parts, maybe use some sort of simple gauge or assy fixture to measure em if there's variability in em, bolt em together in whatever the takt time is on the production line, and do that over and over and over again, millions of times a year, without errors. Turns out, ALL the variability involving gear setup, is in the HOUSING; gears are VERY accurate, butt housings are SLOPPY. So they ACTUALLY machined the pumpkin at least somewhat ACCURATELY for that specific step, and/or had an ACCURATE gauge that could tell em whether this housing was gonna need a .033" or .035" or .039" or whatever pinion shim. Holy Shi'ite!!!! I can't believe I just said that! A car mfr doing something ACCURATELY!!! Turns out, the cost of both ACCURATE machining and a simple gauge system, even if you have to do both together, are WWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY cheeeeeeeeper than abuncha trial-and-error "pattern" monkey-spank on a production line. So, if you have the original pinion shim that came from the factory with THAT housing, you can put a NEW shim of THAT thickness (NOT the old one: use a NEW one of the same thickness as the old one) on your NEW gears behind a NEW bearing, JUST LIKE THE FACTORY DID, and put it into THAT housing, and it will be just like ... NEW ... again. No messing around with "pattern" and trial-and-error and a bucketful of crush sleeves and pressing head bearings on and off the pinion. Just by understanding and following the factory's discipline.

Now if you DON'T have the original shim to measure, or if you have certain gears that don't follow the factory dimensions (*cough*RichmondDragRaceGears*cough*) then you're in "pattern" hell to some extent, and just hafta deal with it. Butt I'll let you in on a little secret: EVERY SINGLE 70s/80s GM axle, 7.5" or 8.25" or 8.5", every Dana (mostly 44s), rear or front (truck or SUV 4WD) that I've ever taken apart (granted, it's not all that many, only maybe a couple dozen or so, butt still), had a .035" shim in it; so I'm pretty sure you can take just about ALL of them, and put in a new pinion with a .035" shim, and be OK, with any other decent quality gears besides those.

 

Hey, got rid of the wiggle. We ended up replacing the crush sleeve with a solid spacer. Fits perfectly. Thank you. We painted the ring gear and we believe it looks pretty good. I just wanted to ask someone who has better eyes for this though. Thank you all, everyone has been such a great help. I don't know what we would’ve done without this forum.

 

:shrug:

Looks more or less OK to me, butt as said, I'm not a good judge of those. I don't use them, and the factory didn't / doesn't either, and I explained why.

What gears are those? (the mfr) What pinion shim thickness did you use? Was it the same as what the housing originally had? What carrier shim thicknesses? How much preload did you put on the pinion before you put in the seal, and how much were you able to get onto the carrier?