^damn...from doin some research i found more people had problems with it than having fun with it, so im NOT doing any welding to those gears no matter what anyone tells me. id rather pay out for an LSD and KNOW that its going to work. rather then always being scared if a weld breaks and the whole thing explodes....

 

Wow.... just wow! That must have felt like someone planted a bomb under your truck?!?! Hopefully the shrapel didn't get kicked up to any of the surrounding vehicles!

 

Speaking of booms im goin OT

i had a 96 Pontiac Grand am GT 5 speed. had a body kit, and nice system in it. The motor had a slight knock. about 45 minutes after purchasing the vehicle. (since i had a new otor being ordered by my mechanic at the time) I decided to beat the **** out of it. So i mash on it, shift from 3rd to 4th at 80MPH, and right when i engaged 4th, sounded like someone let a buckshot go right next to my ear. I look behin me and cant see anything but white smoke. The entire road was covered, and was not visable morethan 10feet. So i got it to the side of the road. and luckily i broke down lss than 150 yards from my best friends grandparents. I tried starting the car again (never looked under the hood)and it started, but sounded like a machine shop. metal grinding, so i shut it down. looked under thehood, and i put te rod through the block, there was a hole the size of a baseball in the side of the motor. So i start it again, and i actually got it to drive to his grandparents like 20 feet from their driveway. I looked down the street and there were literally chunks of the engine in the oil path leading up to where it broke down and where i got it to drive to. Never been so scared, if someone where behind me when it blew, with that white smoke no one would have seen me and smashed me, and its a 50 mph road.

 

The pin sees way more torque than the u-joint, depending on the gears, in my case it was seeing 4.1 times the torque...
Oh really?? Did this all by my self. No broken u-joints. No broken shafts. No proken carrier. Just a V6, a locker and some 33s, on pavement.




There's a reason why you hear about welded diffs exploding, it's because the side gears were NOT welded to the carrier!!!

If you're going off-road LSDs are about useless, get a locker or don't bother.

 

i dont do much off-roading...well i dont go in mud pits and water pits, i go down dirt roads and stuff hunting, and riding in the state reservations

 

Well I guess I stand corrected about it not breaking first, but that pin is still supposed to be able to handle all the torque transferred through the differential despite being open or lsd or a lunchbox locker. But one question, was that after welding the spiders or was that an untouched carrier? Cause I have a hard time believing that pin wasn't heated to an extreme temp and cooled before it snapped... causing it to become brittle.

 

It was with a locker, no heat. It was ever Powertrax's pin, not the stock one. This is why full carrier replacements are advisable, they get rid of weak cross-pins and carriers. In all fairness the axle I was using was undersized (that's why I stepped up to a 31 spline 8.8) but the cross-pin still broke first.

If you're using an axle well within it's limits, like in my Dak, a lunchbox locker should work fine.

Another thing to think about is the weld strength itself, many times the little welds themselves break, welding to the carrier helps distribute the load more evenly.

Do it how you want, just saying that's the only way I'd do it.

 

dang! never seen that happen before... good job i too stand corrected! i was just saying that for ease of returning back to open diff


(my explosion was with an open diff)

 

did you beat the crap out of it? that pin looks pretty solid, cant believe that broke.