Pinion shaft removal question

[K.ronic]

Ok.....I have a 3.08 rear end that I'm trying to swap gears in. When I took the shaft bolt out and it did break, but it broke in a way that let the shaft spin all the way around. I go to slide the shaft out and it gets, for lack of a better description, stuck. The 3.73 gear set I have the shaft slides out just by pushing on it with little to no resistance. I searched around for a bit and saw that lots of people were having problems with the bolt breaking off the wrong way to where you have to extract it, but as I said, this wasn't the issue for me. I could, with a punch and hammer, get the shaft out enough that I could hit it with a grinder and ground it down until I could get the broken part of the bolt out of the shaft just to make sure that wasn't the problem. Now when the shaft is centered in the housing the gears spin like their supposed to, but when I start trying to work the shaft out (with a punch and hammer) the gears completely bind up and won't turn at all. The shaft isn't binding up on the housing because I can jiggle the axles and see play between the shaft and the hole that it's trying to come out of so that tells me that it's getting "stuck" on the gear itself. What's weird about this is that, as I said before, when it's centered it can spin freely inside the gear. When I beat on it with the hammer and punch it gets to a point where it feels like it's hitting something solid like a c-clip or something. And no....I'm not beating on it where it's straight up and down, therefore, hitting the drive pinion.

This is driving me crazy. There, in my mind, is nothing that it could be hitting. When I work it out in either direction the ends of the shaft are making it past the races (?) on the back of the gear so it's not catching that. Is there a c-clip that I'm missing somewhere? Or is there possibly a tapered end on the shaft (I tried to remove the shaft in both directions with the same problem either way)? Is there a possibility that the shaft itself is bent just enough that I can't visibly see it, but enough to not let it come out of the gears? I haven't tried an air chisel on it yet, but if that doesn't work then what else can I do to get it out? I'm not worried about destroying the gears because I'm replacing them anyway (I just want the housing and the 5 lug axles), but I would prefer to not have to grind it completely in two. At this point, the only part I have destroyed is the shaft itself which I can replace.

Here are some pictures of what's happening....






Any help would be greatly appreciated!



P.S. How's that for a 2nd post, LOL?