I just found this out recently from a buddy, and Ive witnessed it so its true. You can go to a junkyard and find a 93-up S10 2wd 4cylinder truck and buy the whole rearend for $80, or if theyll let you take the gears out do that. And they bolt directly into our cars, no shims or anything. And they came with 3.73s, thats the sweet part, and if you are really lucky you might find one with 4.10s i guess too. Just thought this might be usefull info for everyone that isnt getting gears because it costs $500 with the install.

 

You can also use their converters bring stall a few hundred rpms higher.

 

Do you know if the posi unit will work as well??

~John

 

what's the deal with all of this?

is this really true and i also would like to know if the carrier will fit as well.

how much problem would there be in installing and running a "used" set of gears

 

My buddy has ran a set of 3.73s in his 3300 stall auto with heads/cam no problem. Hes running 3.42s now from a S10 also because of tire smoking problems with the 3.73s. They bolt directly in no screwing with shims or anything, they are all 3 series carriers, you can use the center section but not the axle tubs obviously except with modifications.

 

those arent posi from the factory though are they?

so i would still need to get a 3 series posi carrier wouldn't i?

 

ttt does anybody have more on this?

 

Sounds like someone got lucky

You should never just bolt in a different set of gears without setting backlash and pattern. The shims are used to adjust for differences in carriers and housings. Meaning, you can take gears from another identical f-body, but they probably won't have the correct fit without shimming the pinion and carrier correctly. The good thing is that most pinion gears are fairly precise and quite often the factory pinion shim is all that's needed to achieve the right pinion depth. Reshimming the carrier is almost always a must.

If you're reusing the carrier you might get lucky and have it close to spec by just bolting in different gears but I wouldn't count on it. If you get away with it, cool!, but I wouldn't make the blanket statement that it'll work for everybody. I'm rather picky about my gear setup

In the end, it doesn't matter whether your gears came from a truck, another f-body, or are brand new in the box. If you want to just bolt them in, good luck

 

Yeah im not sure if this is a sure thing every time, but hes done it three or four times switching between ratios and he even put a set of 3.73s in a 79 monte carlo that had 2.27s in it, and it runs fine. I just thought maybe someone else had more info on this, this is the first time I had heard anything like it.

 

I'll agree with being able to do it... but you also need to set everything up properly, you can't just swap internals... the shiming of the diff and pinion are housing specific, not gear specific.

So baiscally you can get the gears for nothing, but spend the $85 on an install kit and shim/pre-load everything accordingly.

 

any 7 1/2-7 5/8 rearend in a S-series truck(Blazer,Jimmy,S-10,S-15,SYTY) will fit in a Bird or Cam. SLP even sells these like this when they market the Zexel units. The LSD they pull out of the Z28/TAs to make the SS/Formulas they sell for $99 to us in the trucks or you guys destroy yours. If you pull the gears you just gotta swap the carrier to keep posi


it does require you to shim it like any other gear swap