A starting point
It all began in the summer of 1985…wait. Wrong story, sorry. This is about the Bronco project, and specifically the state of it at the gestation of this site.
Long story short, there are two components that have been touched:
The rear axle
State: complete. A Ford 9” that I have rebuiIt, put new gears in (including a locker), and added a Wilwood disc brake kit. A fairly straight-forward process. Unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of pictures from the “before time”
The front axle
A late 1966 (this is important later) Dana 30 pain-in-my-ass. Still in progress, and the starting point of my stories.
Problem solving with the front axle is actually what prompted this site. I realized that my frustration (and really, embarrassment) might help others realize that those feelings are a normal part of the process.
The story: after blowing through the rear axle, I embarked on rebuilding the front thinking it would be a similar feat. Got some differential measurements, found the depth tool on eBay, and off we go!
First step - setting the pinon. Shimming the bearing cup to get the depth set, no problem. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter the shims, no matter the swearing, getting the pinon preload set was im. poss. ible. Every time I tried (and I lost count of the attempts), I could get the nut only about halfway to its 200 ft lb goal before the bearing preload would already be too tight. I even had my dad come and help one Thanksgiving! For probably over a year I poked at this problem, becoming more and more demotivated with every attempt.
Finally one day in May I went out to the shop, sat down, and reread the instructions. I stared at the diagrams like I was trying to interpret modern art. Finally, an oddity in the shim diagram jumped out at me. A small difference in the black smudge notating shims, and an arrow pointing just slightly to different spot.
I was using the wrong shims, y’all.
The entire time, I’d been trying to shim the bearing cup, just like setting the depth. And this entire time, I’d just been making my problem worse. There was a whole ’nother set of shims in the box. Ones that fit on the pinon and moved the bearing and moved it up and down to set the preload.
Vigor renewed, and paper preload set, here we are.