A buddy changed the pinion seal in his very used GM crush sleeve equipped diff. He replaced the pinion yoke due to a few munged up splines ( pinion splines look good). When installing the "new yoke" the sheet steel shield staked on the yoke rubbed the new seal flange. It is like the flange is going about 1/8 inch deeper. The "new" yoke is about 0.020" shorter than the original. An online tech source says that rubbing is common, and sometimes the flange must be removed. We did that, trued up the shield, and deburred the diff housing nose and the shield still rubs the diff housing lightly. The original yoke shield would rub before we cut the seal flange too. The torque to turn the pinion is still way under 10 inch-lbs, so I'm pretty confident we did nut crush the sleeve any more. ( I don't think we could physically compress the bearings 1/8 inch anyhow). We are making a precision 0.062 inch flange to add between the flange and inner bearing race to move the flange back (forward, actually). 1 - is this yoke shift a common situation? The only physical explanation I can dream up to match the symptoms is the outer races have worn badly, or wore deeper into the housing, but a full rebuild is real hard to justify since it was running fine aside from a weeping seal. thanks Dan T
The Jalopy Journal
