gear noise

[Jeff Chambers]

Yeah mine whine, and I know they were installed correctly. I was standing there

The gears don't whine because the weren't cut correctly. I'm sorry, but every gearset is lapped in at the factory to very precise tolerances. The hypoid gear is fairly tolerable of slight misalignments (slight in the world of gear designers). When they were installed, did you see the mechanic measure the pinion depth? What was the final running torque of the pinion bearings? What was the runout on the ring gear and what was the final measured backlash on the setup? What preload did he apply to the carrier bearings? And last but not least, how did the pattern check on both the drive and coast sides with the gearset under moderate preload?

I worked in the engineering lab at Dana Spicer Axle for several years, and passed up a job offer from their hypoid gear group when I graduated from college...NASA paid less at the time, but it looked better than Dana...that's a different story though. Reusing the factory shims as a lot of folks do will work for about 80% of the cases. It'll work, but 99% of the time the new installation is still out of factory specification. The only way to do it right is to measure everything and install to the factory specs. I've assembled hundreds of gearsets over the years, using the pains taking methods of precision assembly. I've never had a single complaint. As a matter of fact, I've got people who swear that they'll never let anyone but me in their rearends! (hehehe)

Do it right and they'll be whisper quite and last a lifetime.