All right was an interesting winter you could say, had some challenges. But I am not into excuses, I am into building trucks so
GUESS WHO'S BACK
The 2007 Ranger known around here as "the blue truck in the center of the shop" is the ONLY THING in the shop!!
What does this mean? It means I can finally focus all of my time and put this thing together, I plan to work on this sucker from now until it is completed, so log in, tune in and check out the semi daily updates on this beast....because HERE WE GO!
So getting right back into this, starting with the dang CV axle mix up
Custom RCV axle does not fit the spider gear inside the dana 35 carrier
I have a local machine shop that was going to try and help, I took a pair of axles down to them and the owner and I sat and talked about my options.
Turns out there is some super special tooling required to cut splines in axle shafts, they cut at like 5 different angles to get the splines in there. This shop is not setup for this, so they were un able to help (would require like tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars)
So I am going at this with a diamond tip grinder and a dremmel!
So far I am pleased with the results.... doing this by hand, very very carefully, only removing a little bit at a time
First up I needed a spider gear for proper fitment, so I took a IFS dana 35 diff apart to get one
remove cover
remove bearing main caps
remove carrier and bearings
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To get the spider gears out must remove the roll pin with a drift and then center cross pin will come out
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There we go, now I can use the spider gear to ensure the cv axle fits perfectly
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Prep the super expensive super "custom" (but not complete??) CV axles shaft
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new diamond cutting wheels
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So we can see the machine markings in the splines were left unfinished. There is a circular pattern cut in there, the final cuts were never completed by RCV.
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Here you can see I made several light passes with the dremmel to get the spline whipped into shape.
One down, 26 more to go, x 2 sides
I spent a "few" hours on this, until my eyes were tired
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After one pass:
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The goal here is to remove the high parts and get the splined down smooth
I did all the splines on both sides, now I am working to deepen the "valleys"
I fully expect the CV shaft to slide into the spider gear a little later this morning
Tedious is the word of the day
About half way around the first side
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Hang in there folks..... this is gonna be a good one!!
As soon as I finish sorting out the suspension debacle I will be wiring up our drivetrain and Holley drivetrain computer MUAHAHAHAHAHA
Happy Spring! COVID SUCKS and all that...........nothing will stop me now