I care I've been following forever and I've never even owned a GMT800 (daily drove my dad's 03 for a while though). Sweet build.

 

Well class has started back so progress will be a lot slower. I didnt get near as much done in a week as I thought I would, mainly because those seats took a day each to make the brackets.

I had to redo the 10b gearing today because I didnt get the crush sleeve completely crushed and had the most horrible noise youve ever heard when coasting at 30mph+
Heres the pattern I got after today's tinkering



This brings up an interesting thought...when I was searching the interwebs to find possible solutions to my problem, I found a lot of high-hp guys using solid spacers and shims instead of the crusher washer to get the right pinion preload. Any experts have an opinion on that?

Also I discovered the trans crossmember on my 99 is different than my 04. What this means is the crossmember I had made will not work and I will have to come up with something custom

 

The solid spacer is really easy... Just torque down a fresh crush washer and pull it back out, mic it and make a solid spacer the same size. Did this when building the Ford 9" for my dads car. Started a thousandth or two bigger then what the crusher washer was and worked out perfectly.

 

My question is more of is there any advantage of the crush sleeve vs solid spacer or vice versa?

 

Being able to reuse it instead of having to replace the sleeve every time you mess with the pinion.

 

All you have to do with the '99 crossmember is slide it back, drill some new holes in the frame, and bolt it up!

 

That and its just stronger. Think about it, the crushed piece of metal has a chance it could compress slightly more and throw off the gear pattern. I may do this with mine when I put in my truetrac.

 

If you've got a careful eye and a steady hand you can get away with reusing the crush sleeve. Just make a line of marks on the pinion, nut, and yoke and then take it apart and reassemble it. Long as the marks line back up you're good. I did that like 2k miles ago, still runs great. Up to you...I just replaced a pinion seal so I didn't really feel like ripping the whole thing apart to replace the sleeve.

 

I reused the old one and it works perfect....gotta be careful tightening it back though. I compared them when I had it apart and the old one was slightly more compressed, which satisfied my reasoning of what was wrong. I like the idea of a solid for my 14b though, just wanted some feedback first.

 

Looks like you got a pretty good pattern this time around.