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.