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Old 04-07-2013, 11:57 AM   #24
JPBrecheisen
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Harrisville, New York
Posts: 459
Re: Closed knuckle to open knuckle Dana 44 questions

Quote:
Originally Posted by danw210 View Post
Well I took the spindles to the 4x4 shop in town and he suggests that I take the axles to a machine shop and have them turned down to fit the 72 spindles. The amount of material to be cut is probably a few hundredths of an inch. Does anyone see a problem with this approach?
danw210,

Here is what I ended up doing for mine. Like I said, I located an extra pair of outer stubs for a closed knuckle front driving axle, then sent those off to a machine shop to have them turned down a hair in order to fit the later model spindle with bearing rather than the bronze bushing.

I will likely end making the truck original and reinstalling drum brakes, but I had this done just in case I couldn't find parts or decided to keep the disks. As you can see, the spindle bearing fits just fine on the stub after work has been done on it. I hope this helps.

The other picture shows what i found when I originally took mine apart. The outer axle stub was jammed into the bearing and while it would spin/rotate just fine, the stub was actuall stuck within the spindle bearing and had jammed the bearing pretty far into the spindle when the previous mechanic made the swap.

Jonathon
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