Rearend Problems (with pics)

[lukecp]

As many of you know i have been having problems with keeping a 12-bolt in my '72. The original one started howling, so i replaced it with a junkyard 12-bolt, and it lasted all of like a week before it started howling too. That was about 3,000 miles ago, and i have been driving my truck with the howling rear, fed up and waiting for it to break.

So, today is the first day of my spring reccess from college, and i had some free time so i decided to pop the cover and see what was up. I was expecting to find that the pinion would turn over roughly, but that wasn't the case. Looks like the gears are shot.

Since the rearend sat in the junkyard for proably a decade, the axleshafts were covered in rust. I did not see this when i put in the rearend. And the fluid that came out was really, really dark. I pulled out one of the axleshafts, and rust was flaking off of it. The axle tube had lots of little rust bits sitting in it.

So, if you can see from these kinda fuzzy pics, it looks like the rust got ground up in the gears. You can catch the pits with a fingernail, so it looks like my ring and pinion are shot.