rear end slack

[fordman]

i heard a moise like a ujoint noise. a clunking. so ifgured i needed a ujoint. i got underneath and tried to turn the driveshaft by hand to determine which ujoint was abd front or back. it was neither. the rear yoke was doing the turning not the ujoint. so i have slap in the rearend. my conclusions are this a bad yoke, worn ring and pinion gears a loose yoke nut causing the pinion not to be lined up properly with the ring. ultimately i think i know the answer is going to be to replace the ring and pinion or get a used rear. what else could it be. how hard is it to set up a rear end with a new crush bearing and all of that. what do i really need here. i had this happen once before on a brand x and it was a loose pinion nut. i tightened it and the clunking went away. this was all i had time to checkout tonight. this is a 88 9 inch rear end 1/2ton. can i do like they did back in the day and put sawdust in the rear end to quiet the noise seriously getting a whole rear end is a pain because of no tools at the local junkyard to get one out.

[willowbilly3]

The 8.8s are bad about wollering out the yoke splines but old 9 inch rear ends get a bunch of slack in them. I had a 66 that had almost 1/2 turn and it ran forever that way. It's pretty typical. You can pull the punkin and reset everything but the gear set will never adjust out to the right pattern if it has been run that way a long time. It might be tighter but also might get noisier too.

[fordman]

well i got the story kind of wrong. it s not a 9 inch with a center chunk. this is in a 88 f150. i has a removable rear cover with no number beside the cover. so that the rearend im dealing with. my brother in law was saying tonight that i might be able to adjust the shim to make the pinion and ring gear mesh better. is this true on this rear end. i have no idea which rear end this would be called. it looks lik ea dana to me. but its in a 88 f150. five lugs.

[willowbilly3]

It should be the 8.8 Ford. Check the yoke real good, it might be where all the slack is. I haven't rebuilt one but I think the pinion bearings use shims, maybe you could try dropping some front shims if the pinion bearings are getting loose(bad). If you take out too much the pinion bearings will toast in short order.

[fordman]

its no tthe yoke. im going to pull the back cover today when i get down to dads shop as see whats wrong with it.