Delay in Woodturning: Hot Rod in need of Repair!!

So the wife and I decide to take our ’65 Malibu out to a nice Saturday night potluck when a nice loud bang came from the rear of the car about 2 miles from the house   I managed to get the car to the side of the road and call my dad to come tow us home.  While waiting for my dad to show up a nice fellow car guy stopped and looked under the car while I put it in gear.  Well, the drive line was spinning but we weren’t going anyware!!  My dad showed up and I got the car home and grabbed the wife’s car, luckily we have wonderful friends who didn’t mind waiting 1.5 hours for all the hamburger fixings so they could eat.

I wasn’t able to break into the rearend right away since I was in the middle of finishing the bowl for the June wedding.  I finished the bowl as quickly as possible and then jacked up the car and got it on the stands.

Once I got under the car and looked at rearend cover I knew things weren’t going to be pretty inside.

Those copper colored markes are dents from something hitting the cover inside.

 

So I got the cover off and found the spider gears lying on the bottom of the case.  NOT good!  The pin holding them in place had sheared off and let the gears fall to the bottom.  Luckily while towing the car home the axles didn’t move inward letting the c-clips fall off and letting the axle then pull out into the fender of the car.

After getting the broken gears out and looking at the rest of the rearend, both the ring and pinion gears had broken teath.  I now had to replace all of the center section.  I figured it was just a matter of time, this is the only mechanical part of the car that had not been replaced over the 45 years of its life.  I decided to take this opportunity to upgrade the stock 3:08 gears to a posi unit with 3:55 gears.  This will make the car a lot more fun with the automatic and will work well with a future manual transmission! 

I forgot to take any pictures of the cleanup of all the grease on the rearend and the installation of the posi, but I will have to get a nice picture a pair of rubber stripes on the road

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