Heres a good one!....

It finally started cooling down outside so I crawled under my truck and took the driveshaft loose from the differential. I fit a socket over the pinion nut with every intention of tightening it and saw it move as I slid the socket on it! The nut wasn't even hand tight!!!!!! I would say my next door neighbor was 100% correct in his diagnosis.

 

So just an update (not that this is an interesting problem anymore), I soaked the nut in threadlock and tightened it back down to the specified 210 ft*lbs and no more noise!! The bearing is fine and the nut shouldn't come loose again.

Gotta love it when a problem turns out easy to fix!

 

Nice!

 

so... does that mean if you look at my belt squeel (the fan clutch and water pump) that you can just tighten something a little bit and it'll go away? that would be highly convenient... maybe you just have the right eyes for lookin lol

 

Your are lucky. What about the crush sleeve now?

 

Lol, the crush sleeve is staying put! I'm just going to assume that it's still in good shape. It would be a big PITA to change it, cause it's between the front and rear pinion bearings, so the entire differential would need to be taken apart. If I ever re-gear it to 3.21s like I want to, then I'll change the crush sleeve.

 

Why would you want to regear to 3.21s? IMO 3.55s are too little gear for 31s, let alone 3.21s.

 

Cause the NV3500 has lower ratios then the 46rh did (my rpms are higher on the interstate than they used to be). Also, first gear is especially low, so 3.21s will make better use of the engines power.

 

Did you loose any mileage? IMO it's going to make it slower regardless of how low 1st gear is. I doubt you'll gain hardly any mileage except maybe above 70 MPH, I can get nearly 22MPG with 3.55s and 31s. My explorer has 3.27s with 235-75-15s and it's way too tall geared, I get nearly 2MPG better if I stay out of 5th under 65, I know it's only a 4.0 but still..

 

Are you sure your speedometer and trip meter are still calibrated correctly, cause I've never seen or heard of a 5.2 get 22 mpg. When I put the 31.5 inch tires on my truck, it threw the speedometer and trip meter off by 10%. Just out of luck, the new transfer case that was bolted to the nv3500 had a 3.90 speed sensor in it which put my calibration right back to being dead on (cause I would have had to put 3.90 gears in my truck to bring the oversized tires back down to the ratio of the 3.55s and factory tires).