Assembly commenced on the rear rotors at the bench to make sure all our fabrication was honky dori, it seemed to be, so we took it back apart to lighten the load when it came time to hang it on the springs. I made up my own greasable shackle bolts by taking a stainless steel bolt and drilled a hole halfway down the length on a lathe with a #3 (.213) dia. drill which is the tap drill size for a 1/4-28 thread to accept a grease fitting. Then I milled 2 slots opposite each other along the length in the area covered by the urethane bushings with a carbide ball end mill. A crossed drilled hole was put in connecting the 2 slots with a #38 (.101) dia. drill at the position where the 2 bushings met, then tapped the end for the grease fitting with a 1/4-28 tap. The urethane bushings were cross notched where the 2 inside ends met, this will allow grease to flow through the bolt and to the inside and outside of the bushings. Everything I hear is that these bushings
are prone to squeaking, so hopefully this will take care of that. The axle was then set on top of the springs, and as I was gathering the u-bolts, Jeffrey says something doesn't look straight. I figure, how can that be, but sure enough it was not straight. That's when you start to get this bad feeling in your stomache. Here it turns out that there is more than one hole on the bottom of the spring pads and one of them wasn't centered on the leaf spring bolt. I won't tell whose side it was, but I'm glad he spotted it before the u-bolts were torqued down. We then installed the u-bolts and sway bar and torqued them to spec. Slid in the axles and rotors, painted the caliper brackets red to stay with the performance image and thing were looking good. The calipers will also be painted red but didn't get them yet due to the fact I couldn't find them for under $75.00 apiece, and we didn't need them right away. Priority is to get this thing down on all fours. At this point I was curious to see how good a job I did welding the Isuzu ends on so I mounted a magnetic base to the frame with a dial indicator on the rotors and only had .005 runout, within the limits, so I was happy. Next we'll tackle the front housing.

The rebuild went rather well on the rear Dana 44 rear housing. A rebuild kit was purchased from http://www.4wd.com/ part number 8744 at $89.95. This comes with all the good stuff, like Timken bearings, seals, shims, pinion nut, ring gear bolts and sealer and marking compound, no overseas crap. For the price you can't beat it, although a set of instructions of anything would have been great. Since this was our first time at setting up a rear, I wasn't about to wing it, which I've been known to do. I found a good set of detailed instructions on the internet at http://precisiongear.com/. http://trailhed.com/images/d44/d44p2.jpg and http://trailhed.com/images/d44/d44p3.jpg and http://trailhed.com/images/d44/d44p1.jpg and http://trailhed.com/images/d44/d44p4.jpg
We first started by carefully washing out all the sand left over from the blasting process and even took a wire chimney brush on a drill and ran it through the tubes. All threads were chased with a tap so as to get proper torque readings later on. First thing I did was to make up a set of "setup" bearings, these I honed with a drill mounted cylinder hone so they would slip over the both ends of the carrier housing and sanded the O.D. on the pinion races on a belt sander. This allows for repetive install and removal until you get the proper shim thickness. (One thing that was quite tedious was mastering the stroke on the drill mounted cylinder hone, I overstroked a few times, and we all know what happens when you overstroke. It wasn't pretty. Imagine a long flexable drill mounted 3 stone cylinder hone winging at 1000 rpm's and coming out of the hole on the vise mounted bearing!!!) It got the job done, but I think I need a new cylinder hone. I do see now that Precision Gear offers "setup bearings" that are made just for this purpose. Might be worth looking into. Just follow their detailed installation hints from the links I listed above. These are very informative pages and have lots of pictures. Since this rear already had a 3:54 gearset in it from the junkyard things were pretty well in spec. but we went through the whole procedure as a learning tool for the front housing which will require a gear change, so hopefully we gained enough knowledge to do that one right also.