I love these old trucks!!

 

Alright another step taken. The shake from the drive line was getting BAD!! I pretty much figured my tailshaft bushing was toast...so I ordered up all the parts and finally got to it over the weekend.

Fairly straight forward...remove a bolt from either side of the tranny side cover...where the PTO would go, and let drain. Then remove drive shaft(s) and tranny mount and cross member, and then find a 10mm 12Point socket to remove 8 bolts...use heat on each one to loosen blue loctite. Remove speedo gear assembly and it's ready to come part.



And rear section off....



I had ordered a new 5th gear and nut from Quad4x4, since I was unsure of what I might find. I found everything in good shape, with the original chrysler updated nut. Everything appeared to be in fine shape so I left it alone for now.

 

Now that the rear section of the tranny was off I could use a hack saw to cut through the old tailshaft bushing.



Once cut it just slips right out. This thing was TOAST!! You can see how hot it had been getting, and there was very little material left on the inside of the bushing.





I didn't snap any pics of the reassembly process....cold and raining and wasn't too thrilled about laying out in the weather.

I put the new bushing in the freezer for a day...then brought the housing in the house to get warm. I then used a chunk of ABS pipe to help drive the new bushing into the housing. This was a chore though...I should have warmed the housing up in the oven at 300 deg or so...might have slipped in a little easier. I ended up rolling the edge a bit, so I had to file and sand the outer section of the new bushing to clean things up....not too bad though.

 

I decided since it was all apart that I would play with my speedo. My crew is a 84, but the donor was a 89. I have a 96 NV4500 and a cable driven speedo.

Ever since I got the truck the speedo has spun too fast. It has been about 8-10 KM/H off. I removed the speedo gear housing from the tranny, and as Mark Nixon has mentioned, it's your standard mopar speedo housing and gear used from mid 60's on up into the 90's.



So I find a 27 tooth speedo gear inside. I figure since I'm running 3.54's I should have a 35 tooth unit....nope wrong. With the 35 tooth gear I was now running 20 KM/h too slow. So out it came again and I swapped in a 32 tooth unit. I'm now darn close...think my speedo is about 1-2 KM/H slow....might have to get a 31 tooth speedo gear and try that. I have a good selection of speedo gears from parting out mopars over the years...but I don't have a 31 tooth gear. But these are readily available.

I'm running stock 235/85/16 tires and rims...so this is pretty close to a stock set-up.

 

And a couple pics of everything done and back in place....





The vibration is significantly lessened now...but something is still out of alignment, or balance. I'm going to replace my carrier bearing again and see if maybe I got a bad unit right out of the box? I bought a unit off E-bay so I can't return it for any warranty.

 

looking good...

 

And Just think all that work you just did will have to come back apart when you convert it to 4x4

 

Next time you have the rear driveshaft out, have it checked for balance.

 

No No No he won't have to worry Because when he convert's it to 4x4 all that will change anyway .Infact he's Looking for part's already PS I have the spring hanger's for the front spring's

 

I know it will all have to change for the 4x4 swap. I've been considering what I should do with a NV4500 rebuild. Since I'm eventually going to go 4x4, I'll need a new main shaft, and rear housing to mount the tranfer case.

So I'm contemplating just saying F'it with the 2wd tranny mount and cross member, and use a 4x4 cross member and just adapt it from there. Then when I need to rebuild the NV4500...which I think might be sooner then later...I'll just rebuild it as a 4x4 tranny, mount a transfer case, and be done.

I know this will look goof with it still being a 2wd...but I don't want to spend the money twice. Rather look goofy, and save my pennies.

 

It won't look goofy I drove my old crewcab around for close to a yr with just frontend under it as I collected part's to convert it to 4x4

 

You, sir TC, do great work. Very well done!

 

PM me if you want to sell those...

I'm thinking I might just piece together the 4x4, rather then try and buy a whole truck. Wife would freak if I brought home a complete truck...parts on the other hand...with 3 projects constantly on the go she never questions my acquisition of individual parts...

And I thank you Sir!!

 

Glad to see your doing a 4wd conversion. Building one rightnow.

 

OK I finally made my decision...I`m going to convert the crewcab to a 4x4. ...Darn you Val (Simplysmn)....

SO the hunt has been on for a donor. I put a bunch of want ads on craigslist, and other on-line diesel forums and received a few responses. For some reason I got quite a few with cummins trucks with 3.07 diffs. I wanted 3.54`s, but could live with 4.10`s. I eventually go a response from a fellow who had a complete truck sitting. He said the truck needed a couple grand worth of repairs so was going to let it go cheap.

I thought this might be a good one. So a couple weeks ago I went out to check it out. turned out to be an original owner truck, 1993 Club Cab, Cummins, Auto 4x4, LE model...full load. Has a few issues, but he was still using it for dump runs now and then. I couldn`t pass it up!

I drove it home earlier this week....Here are a few pics.