1989 Dodge D350, don't expect anything exciting here.

Today I learned; I need to buy a torque wrench and learn how to use it.

So i guess those were there at one point and now they're.. not? Yeah, that's another lucky catch before it went all wrong, just like your diff pin/carrier.

Apparently it heard I was thinking about selling it so it decided to hatch a plan to kill me through my own stupidity. Luckily I got the drop on it though.

So, does anyone know where I could find a 94-96-ish nv4500 2wd donor truck? I constantly troll craigslist for such a thing but I'm not sure if there's somewhere else I should be looking. I'm in the Bowling Greeen, Kentucky area.

Because I have terrible priorities in life and most of my gauges don't actually work...

Turns out I need to collect more supplies before I can actually hook them up. and don't worry the reflection on the lenses is not actually as bad as in the picture.

Also, yes, all the mounting tabs are broken on my HVAC controls.

Ordered parts to piece the rear diff back together last night, supposed to be here Tuesday. Decided to just stay with the open diff for now just to get the truck back on the road. If I ever actually get my E36 M3 together enough to do a trans swap, I'll look at getting a Dana 80 with a 3.54 gear and limited slip then.

Tearing into the axle now, so far the only unexpected damage I've found ia boogered threads on the right side wheel studs where those lug nuts backed off. Axle shafts have grit on them from the carrier damage but the splines don't appear to be damaged in any way.

Progress tonight was halted by me not having a big enough socket to get the yoke off the pinion.

Do you have a big enough socket to take the drums off the back? I had that problem when I had my old truck of this vintage.

Also, mine had the Getrag. Though I suspect the NV4500 would work just as well. No problems with the Getrag. My "new" K3500 has the NV4500. Only real issue is they're pretty picky (from what I've read) about the type of gear oil used. Redline makes a product that replaces the OEM (and, conveniently, NLA) Castrol Syntorque.

Speaking of redline, highly recommend their gear oil for that rear end when you button it back together. I did the 10 bolt in the wife's Suburban and the Redline quieted the gear whine from annoying to barely perceptible.

I don't have a socket big enough for that either, but I didn't have to pull the drums off to get the axle shafts out do to the full floating-ness. I do need to get that socket too and replace those nuts because the last guy that took them off didn't have that socket either, so he used a hammer and chisel. Which I will be doing soon, because it's probably about time for brake shoes, but right now I just want this thing driving again.

Old carrier is out. The plan was to reuse the old spider gears because I didn't see anything wrong with these. 5 hours of hammering, grinding, and cutting later, the gears are still being held in the old carrier by the cross shaft.

Use a cutting wheel to cut the part of the carrier that holds the roll pin or bolt or whatever is holding the diff pin into the carrier and then hammer it out that end.

Yeah I think we're down to either removing a chunk of the carrier or ordering new gears. The roll pin is out, roughly 1/2 inch of both ends of the pin have been cut off, and we still can't get it to move enough to come out.

Ok I was going to ask a stupid question about what this ring I took off the carrier was, after a short google, it appears to be exactly what I thought it was, the tone ring for the rear wheel ABS that I've never noticed doing anything at all the entire time I've had the truck.

So now the stupid question is, does this actually have to be here? And if it does, what's the special trick to putting it back on?

Edit, and Oh yeah, we got the old spider gears out, determined they were also trashed, I order new ones, found out they came with half the E36 M3 I had already bought. I also have 3 of those nifty little collector fridge magnets from Rock Auto now.

Ive never felt rear wheel abs working on any dodge truck i've been around that's had it which is several just in my family and tons of them that ive driven. Having said that i'm not sure what it costs you to keep it..

I honestly didn't know my truck had rear wheel abs until I took the glove box off for some reason and found the control box for it... which now I'm questioning because I'm not sure if it was this truck or that other one.

My '92 Dodge had rear ABS. My current K3500 (1993) has it, too. Might as well keep it, if there's any wheels on a pickup you don't want locking up, it's the rear ones.

I always thought the rear-only ABS was Ford being cheap or weird somehow. Good (I guess?) to see that it extends to all the Big Three trucks.

I'm fairly certain 1980s Chrysler's cheap skate game was pretty on point too.

It seems that your not washing vehicles game is pretty on point, too.

Yeah about that... I'll probably do something about that when it rolls again. Or not, probably not.

After fighting all day just to figure out what we were doing, I think it might roll again tomorrow.

So I spent most of the day, got it almost done, went to work, got home at 11 with the goal of bolting the wheels on, filling the diff with oil and taking it for a short drive. This is where I remembered the Bravada is blocking my truck in. The Bravada won't start and is missing some of the transfer case crossmember bolts (long story, I'll probably explain later). So I decided to go ahead and try to fix it good enough to move it out of the way, but decided I didn't really feel like fumbling around in the dark under it to get it movable after I got home from work, and starting an open a manifold 4.3 (again, long story) at 11:30pm on a Sunday probably wouldn't be appreciated by the neighbors anyway.

And finally, I think the free-form Dana 70 rebuild odyssey has come to it's conclusion. It's mobile again, and I'm in a pretty good mood.

Drove it into town to get lunch, pretty sure the diff is behaving as designed now. But now it feels like the brakes are sticking and I really don't trust those studs, so I won't deem it roadworthy until I fix those issues.

I did get more stickers though.