Question on regearing.

[SeniorGustas]

So my wheel bearings raped my last axel and i found it was cheaper to buy a new dana 35 and dana 30 for $100 then doing the bearings. after doing my far share of research o found that my I4 had stock 4.10 gearing i believe. Now the axels i bought were sold to me as 4:10 but after the install my jeeps seems to pull much harder and keep up on the freeway better, an no more 4wd :( almost like im driving in 4 lo.. i did buy the front and rear axel. So my question is. how hard would it be to pull the gears from my dana 30 and swap them with the gears of the dana 30 i bought? asumming that the two axels i bought have the same gear ratio. he lead me to believe that the were stock but someone had opened the rear diff before and did a sloppy job resealing it and they are painted bright orange.. :/ ha I'll appreciate any advice. Im trying to avoid a front axel swap .

[LizardRunner]

if they are indeed 4:10, they aren't stock. A gear change means ring and pinion, proper torque on bolts and setting it up for proper clearances. We have a write up on here about how to do it.

[LizardRunner]

http://www.xjtalk.com/showthread.php?t=5842 might want to read this

[Mudderoy]

So my wheel bearings raped my last axel and i found it was cheaper to buy a new dana 35 and dana 30 for $100 then doing the bearings. after doing my far share of research o found that my I4 had stock 4.10 gearing i believe. Now the axels i bought were sold to me as 4:10 but after the install my jeeps seems to pull much harder and keep up on the freeway better, an no more 4wd :( almost like im driving in 4 lo.. i did buy the front and rear axel. So my question is. how hard would it be to pull the gears from my dana 30 and swap them with the gears of the dana 30 i bought? asumming that the two axels i bought have the same gear ratio. he lead me to believe that the were stock but someone had opened the rear diff before and did a sloppy job resealing it and they are painted bright orange.. :/ ha I'll appreciate any advice. Im trying to avoid a front axel swap .

I believe that the 4 cylinder XJ's may have come with 4.10 gears, but 6 cylinder auto trans were 3.55. I seem to remember something about a towing package and they'd come with 4.10. Bottom line is the axles are likely 3.55 if they are stock.

Pretty easy to find out by rotating and counting.

[YJeXtreme]

You can count teeth on ring gear then divide by teeth on the pinion gear to get the ratio... 4cyl Jeeps did come with 4.11 ratios, which are great if your running larger tires...

As for the swap, you'll need a new master install kit & the ability to remove the carrier bearings, plus a run out gauge to check backlash...

[SeniorGustas]

SO.. probably not going to try to regear. hahaha how do i go about counting the gears to figure out my ratio?

[4.3LXJ]

You will have to pull the covers, count the number of the teeth on the ring gear and divide by the number of teeth on the pinion. So for instance a Dana axle 4.10 ratio will have 41 ring gear teeth and 10 pinion teeth. Should be able to find numbers like that on the tags on the cover too