About 2K miles ago I performed a full rebuild of the rear differential for my 93 B-150 Ram Van. It has a plain old 9.25" diff with 5-lug axles. The unit had a slow leak at the cover gasket and it eventually ran dry and scored the bearings and races something awful. My bad for not checking the gear oil often enough.

After disassembly and inspection I decided to replace the following:

Pinion Races & Bearings
Pinion Seal
Carrier Case Races & Bearings
Wheel/Axle Bearings
Wheel/Axle Bearing Seals

I re-used all of the gears, the pinion, the carrier case, adjusters, bearing caps, etc.

Tough job in the driveway, but I managed it all in an afternoon with some help from the bearing press at the local automotive machine shop. The diff was filled to the proper level with Royal Purple full synthetic gear oil, and it is still full.

The rear was almost silent (not perfect - the outer axle races had some galling) until last week when it began to groan as I made slow left and right rurns between 15 - 30 MPH on secondary roads. Anyone know what is gone wrong back there?

 

You didn't mention if you replaced the pinion crush sleeve. Did you?

 

The pinion's collapsible spacer (crush sleeve) was replaced.

 

Believe it or not, torquing the pinion nut to get the correct crush on the sleeve is the most critical part of the rebuild job. Any chance the correct torque and final drag setting of the pinion wasn't done correctly?

 

I paid special attention to doing this properly - even borrowed a digital readout torque wrench to get it right. The rear was pretty darn quiet until recently, and it only groans when rounding corners at relatively low speeds. Seems unlikely it's related to the pinion (?) but more likely related to another section of the differential....

 

Groaning when turning, I would think the spider gears. Since they are straight cut also more prone to making noise. Were the gears pitted when you re installed them?

Maybee the galled axle races are a factor as well when in a turn.

I'm no expert on it, when my diff went bad, I knew I did not have the knowledge nor the special tools required to take on the project myself.

 

I didn't mean to offend. I wasn't there during the rebuild, nor do I know your skill level for such a project...so I had to ask.

 

No prob, there was no offense taken. I'm not very easily offended anyway. :-D I'f the noise gets any worse I'll run to the boneyard and grab a junker carrier out of a dead van and swap it out. This will give me a good chance to change the gear oil and gasket plus a chance to more carefully inspect the condition of what's going on in there. If there's a good deal on junker axles I may get two of those also to remove them as suspects in my noise problem.

 

It was a little less than a year ago that I swapped out my 8 3/8 with a junkyard 9 1/4. I visited about a dozen junkyards in the San Diego area.

The prices ranged from 250$ to 550$
The one I got 9.25 was the one with the least amount of miles on it ($450).
The 250$ 8 3/8 was a grey sludge filled mess.
Long story short. I was noisier than the 8 3/8 I took out. I had a shop replace the bearings and they found it was bent as well. They were able to reuse the ring and pinion and spider gears. They straightened the axle as well. One pinion bearing was the noisy culprit. It felt like 120 grit sandpaper was in between the rollers and races .
Another 900$.

Hope you make out better than I did.

 

Yeah, me too. Good news about the mid-atlantic region is that rust retires B vans early, many with less than 100K on the clock. Good mechanical parts are plentiful and relatively cheap. The local ez-pull has complete truck rears for $50 as long as you do the work.