Posted by Matt Wilson [108.162.221.179] on Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 11:25:08 :
In Reply to: Differential Gasket Thickness posted by Matt Wilson [108.162.221.17] on Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 15:22:23 :
Thanks to everyone for your input. I decided to go ahead and leave the setup as is, with the thinner gasket. I took off the right axle shaft and rotated it to try it out in several positions (meaning I paired up the holes in the flange with different studs on the hub) and found that in some positions, I could slide the shaft all the way in by hand with little effort, while in other positions, the flange would stop short, leaving a small gap that I could not close by hand, and just used a dead blow hammer with light tapping to seat it the rest of the way. I think what was happening was the holes in the shaft flange were interfering slightly with the smooth part of the studs, due to tolerance stackup. In other positions, the tolerances were such that there was no interference. Also, I did something else - and yes, I'm an engineering nerd - I ran through some equations to determine how much stress would be produced in the axle shaft if there was a 0.010" deflection caused by the wrong gasket size, and the stress is rather on the small side. Not only that, but my gut tells me there shouldn't be an issue with a 0.010" offset when it's 25" (the approximate length of the shaft) away from the flanged region that would be subject to the bending that people talked about, as the setup should be able to accommodate this amount of displacement. Further reassurance is that the gaskets were provided by the differential rebuilder, who I believe knows his stuff. Obviously, I hope I'm not wrong. In the end, I guess we'll see...
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