I am going to have the 12 bolt on my Chevelle slightly narrowed, and Moser ends added.

The shop here in town wants me to remove the carrier. He told me if I kept the shims together and marked, I could just replace the carrier without having to re-set it up...

Does this sound feasible?

Has anyone done it this way?


Joe

i had a bad carrier in one of my 12 bolts (2.73 for when i went up to the super chevy show 500+ miles round trip) I didnt want to run the 3.55s bc i have no overdrive so i decided to swap complete rears. I bought another 2 series carrier and had new bearing pressed on and bolted the ring gear up from the bad carrier and left the shims in place and put it all back together. It did great on the long trip. No noise.

You should not have a problem if you keep everything together. When I first started running this car I used to pull the carrier and axles every year. I never saw anything bad so I stopped doing it. I figure with mine if it's going to break it will be quick.

IF the guy that puts the pinion in gets the depth exactly the same as it was before you can use the same shims. I wouldn't bet on it though. Setting the backlash is the easiest part of setting up a rear end. Don't risk a noisy or self destructive ring gear to save a few bucks on shims. I just replaced the gear set in my son's car that was installed by a so called "professional". There was so much backlash that it took out two teeth on the ring gear.

Tom

Sorry, should have been more clear - he said I could leave the pinion... it would be staying

So I guess the concensus is that it is ok?

Joe

Check your backlash before disassembly and again after it's reassembled. I just (1 month ago) replaced my Auburn Pro Carrier with the replacement (D-REX program) provided by a local driveline shop. The shop had rebuilt the rearend two years earlier but I was preparing for PINKS ALL OUT and didn't want to pull the whole thing out. They pressed the bearings and swapped the ring, I did the rest at home. Theorectically the backlash and preload should be the same, I think mine was .001 different, but that could have been because of a slight angle variation of the dial indicator between measurements.