spider gears.... my rearend at low speeds sound like back in the day when you would tape baseball cards to your bike spokes and ride it. ha i still drive it though but its not my dd

 

LOL, I drove mine for a week like this, popping like crazy. When I was going to take it apart, I spun the axle with the cover off and parts fell out. It appears that the center pin bolt broke allowing the center pin to drop down some allowing the spider gear to no longer mesh together, instead the teeth were riding on top of each other. One of them is almost completly rounded off. I dont think mine would have held together another day without leaving me stranded.Weird part is the ring and pinion look great for having so much metal floating around in there. The magnet of course was covered in metal, the washers behind the smaller gears were broke up into pieces, many small pieces of gear teeth in there, and the oil was silver from all the metal in it.

 

ya i will be sure to post pics when i pull my cover off im sure its lookin real good in there ha

 

cleaned everything up this morning, the amount of metal shaving inside the diff was crazy. Put everything back together, took it for a couple test drives, nice and quiet and all the slack is gone as well when placed in gear. The Yukon parts came packed nicely and Randys ring and pinion came thru with quick shipping. I plan on changing the gear oil in about a week just to make sure I got all the shavings.

 

I have the same clanking noise that just started a couple weeks ago.
I have 4:30 gears with a TruTrac and a 4" steel drive shaft. I broke the stock drive shaft on the test drive after installing the gears. Anyways, what can be the problem resulting from the clanking noise after putting it in D or R?

 

Unfortunately the yukon stuff I bought from Randys broke shortly after installation. They only last like two months. The center pin failed and tore everything up, I had to cut the open diff in half to remove everything LOL. I ended up putting in 3.73s with a locker and bought all my new parts from Rons machining. He gave me a great price (mention your a member here)and shipped quick. I have been beating on them since, about a year and a half.

The noise you describe is fairly common in chevys, but it usually from u joints. You might also want to check your pinion bearing.

 

I got my parts from Rons aswell. I asked around about my noise, and the answer i got was that my pinion angle is off since i dropped my truck a few weeks ago. I need to turn my differential downwards a few degrees to release the stress. Im going to work on the truck tomorrow after work. im just hoping i didnt mess up anything inside.