so last week I pulled out to head to the gorcery store and notced a weird sound coming from the rear end. it wasnt that loud at this point but it was noticable. It sounded like someone shaking a can of sand, kind of like a shake/grind/whine sound all in one. I got home and parked it, and the next morning the sound was gone. Well this afternoon I pulled out of my moms driveway to head home and I noticed that sound again. This time it started out the same but quickly turned into a loud clankclankclankclank sound that changed with the rpms and wheel speed. It got to the point where I pulled over to check things out, didnt see anything missing, so I hopped back in and took off. I got a reaaalll bad vibration under acceleration, as well as the clankclankclankclank. Embarrased, I headed to my in-laws place which was only 2 or so miles from me. After I parked it there and shut her down, I grabbed the driveshaft (the shorter of the 2 piece driveshaft) and pushed it up and saw some play between the shaft and the hanger thats there (Carrier bearing???)

Is this play normal? If I wiggle it around, there is a metal-to-metal sound. Could this be causing my clankclankclankclank on accleration? Is this bearing/support bad? And if so, how long of a job is this?

 

The center (carrier) bearing should be pretty tight around the driveshaft. If you can lift the driveshaft a bit up & down; thats' bad...
However the clanking sounds like a u-joint ready to go.
My dad took it upon himself to replace the carrier in my dually while I was working...he said it was the weird one of the 3 or 4 Dodge used (& of course the more expensive $100 dealer only one). The parts stores had the others in stock & were around $30 I think?

 

how can i tell if any of the ujoints are bad? They all look and feel exactly the same as they did before the problem started, If anything i'd rather replace a few ujoints and see if it makes the obnoxious CLANK go away so I can get it out of my inlaws driveway and then if needed i can replace that bearing. Are ujoints pretty much a straight forward swap? or does anything special need to be done/ any special tools needed?