Pinion Assembly
 

hello!

i got myself a new set of pinion & gear, ratio 4,56, for my 90 k5 blazer.
the set of course is for the rear gm 8.5 10 bolt axle.
when i removed the old pinion (which was broken) i found out that the person that installed it, grind the pinion in a way that the small bearing can slip in easily by hand.
on the new pinion i installed the big bearing with two small shims on it.
now both of the cups, the big one and the small one, and the oil seal were installed into the housing.
all that is left to do is to put the pinion in and close the yoke, and by doing this, this will push the small bearing into place..
the thing is that in some point i couldn't keep going and the gape was still quite big, which means that the small bearing isn't touching the floating shim yet.
now i don't know what i need to do in order to assemble the pinion into place properly.

thanks in advance, Yarin.

Did you check to make sure that everything fit onto the pinion properly before putting it into the diff housing? The front bearing should fit snug on the pinion shaft, but still slide. Sounds like it may be hanging up somewhere in there. Either that or you are just tight to the crush sleeve and need to, well, crush it to get to the proper bearing preload.

I always like to make setup bearings out of a new inner bearing to properly set pinion depth. Without doing that, you really just took a guess at where the pinion is sitting by installing two shims between the inner bearing and the pinion gear.

well, the bearing does slide in, but it stops right around when the teeth ends.
now i don't think i got to the crush sleeve because i removed the pinion and saw the marks left by the pinion, and the mark is about 1 millimeter away from touching the crush sleeve.
what i was trying to ask is - am i doing this the right way? the bearing should slide in by torquing the nut?
and another question - is it possible that the bearing can't reach the crush sleeve because i put two thin shims in front of the big bearing?

yarin.

OK, I found a decent illustration and changed some things around to give a picture of what is going on in there. It is attached below:
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1..._pinion_CS.gif

Basically, you should be able to loosely put things together getting the inner and outer bearing to both be resting on the crush sleeve. You may want to take the seal and outer bearing out (leaving the outer race in the diff housing) of the housing and dry fit them outside the diff housing to make sure that they can fit down in properly.

it turned out that i wasn't able to crush the sleeve using manual tools for some reason, so i took him out and saw the gapes disappear.
So I've put the old crush sleeve which is about one millimeter smaller and the pinion sat in place with ease... so thanks very much for the advice!
now i got myself a new "Yukon Gear" pinion & gear, and a new Detroit locker.
the truck was out for about 6 months so I'm excited, and i owe a lot to you, you've been a great help.

thanks, yarin.