Make Your Own Spool by Welding Your Gears! - Operation Cheap Jeep

Now if you noticed there, the tag fell off of the diff cover. And this is the little tag that you're looking for if you want to figure out your gear ratio. It's going to be a little bit hard to see, it's got some crud on there, but if we polish that up we should be able to figure out the gear ratio. Okay, so there are the numbers that we're looking for. 3.73, that is your gear ratio. Now the numbers right here, that is your BOM, or the bill of materials. And I would like to tell you that those numbers mean something but they're pretty much just kind of random. You can put these numbers into a website. It's www2.dana.com So if you put those numbers in there, it'll tell you all the part numbers and your axle gear ratio and all kinds of other stuff. www2.dana.com And that's your BOM number. Now if your axle doesn't have the tag, or it got lost, or you can't read it, not to worry, you can still figure out your gear ratio. It's just going to be a little bit harder. So one thing you can do is look up the serial number of your vehicle. But if somebody's gone in there and changed it at some point, and you don't know what it is, you can still figure it out by counting the teeth. So what you want to do, make you a little mark right here, and we're going to count the teeth on the ring gear. Okay, I've got 41 on the ring gear. Now back here, it's going to be hard to see for you guys, but on the pinion gear, I need to count those as well. So you can't really see it, but there's a gear called the pinion gear that meshes with this one. I need to count the teeth on that. Okay, so I got 11 on that one. So if you do the math, you do 41 divided by 11, and put that in your calculator, you get 3.73. And that's the gear ratio, 3.73 to 1. Now what that means is every time your driveshaft there turns 3.73 times, your tire is going to rotate once. So almost four turns of the driveshaft rotates your tire one time. Keep in mind that you can have different ratios in your transfer case. Normally that's going to be 1 to 1 in high range, and then 2.71 to 1 in low range, unless you have something like an Atlas, which you can get in 3.8 to 1, 4.2 to 1, 5 to 1 on the transfer case. Okay, let's heat things up a little bit, and then we'll do it to it. Now if you're unsure of what we're doing here, you should go back and check out Tyler's video on how to link and lock your differential. But basically we're going to weld up all this, besides the pin of course, besides the center pin and the end of the axle shafts here. This is a c-clip. But we're going to weld that up and make a cheap locker, sometimes called a Lincoln locker, or just called a cheap spool. Basically it's going to turn this into a spool, because everything will be welded solid, the wheels will have to turn together. I should also mention that you don't want to be welding on brake clean, and I used the non-chlorinated type of course, but I also cleaned it out real good, and then I hit it with this to make sure that everything was clean and dry, and also warmed it up so that it's nice and hot, because this is cast, and you want it to be warm. Okay, there you go, that turned out pretty good. I welded the spider gears on the side here, and then I welded them to each other, being careful not to weld the cross pin or the shafts, and turned out pretty good. I'm going to let it cool slowly, and then we'll be Lincoln locked after I put the diff cover back on, put some fluid in it.