Ring and Pinion Break-in Done

After we get 500 miles on the jeep finishing our break-in period, we pull the differential covers and inspect the gears. We look at the bite pattern on the ring gears to make sure the ring and pinion bite pattern is good, then we check the oil we drained for metal.

Jeep Gear Change Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9vNnMj1ZmcY1OobKHopgTe7UR3p9u9xx

Removing the Differential Cover

When we install the gears, we didn’t use any silicone making it easy to remove the differential cover once we reached 5oo miles and we had to change the gear oil. Here we are removing the pan cover by hand, and the old gasket was not damaged as the ring and pinion cover was removed. You can see the color of the oil is very dark, this is why they recommend changing the differential oil when you install a ring and pinion.

Ring and Pinion Inspection

Once we had the pan cover off we could access the gears and see how our newly installed ring and pinion was doing. We were really happy to see that our install was great, the wear on the ring gear was as expected with nice wear on the tooth. If the pinion gear was to shallow the wear pattern would have been more apparent toward the top of the ring gear tooth and also could have caused chipping. If the pinion gear was too deep in the ring gear, it would have caused chipping of the pinion and scratching of the ring gear.

Putting the Differential Pan On

Once the inspection of the gears was done and we needed to make no adjustments, time to put the pumpkin cover on the differential. Remember that these bolts won’t handle a bunch of torque so don’t over tighten them, they could break. Also with how many bolts there are and how close they are together, the seal will be good as long and your surfaces are clean and gasket is good. We reused the old differential gasket because we don’t use much to any silicone.

Pump Oil Back Into Differential

Once the pan cover is on and tightened to torque spec, time to add good gear oil. Due to how tight it is on our Jeep Wrangler YJ we can’t just pour in the gear oil, we have to pump it. Here you can see our son using our stern drive oil pump for our boat to fill the differentials on the jeep.

Our Final Thoughts

Really happy with the 4.88 ring and pinion in this jeep with a small 2.5-liter engine. gave us the power we need on the highway. They also improve trailing with much slower crawl speed when things get technical. See the playlist above if you want to look at more projects and testing of these 4.88 gears.