[aemravan]

Wireless driveshaft for the win... Made quick work of pulling the rear driveshaft out , and guess what??? Absolutely 0 binding/locking up/noise, etc.

Decided to give it a quick test drive in very new, FWD 2003 4runner.. and to my very unpleasant surprise I think the noise is POSSIBLY coming from the front diff.....

It certainly felt not very right as I made my way through the neighborhood. No constant sounds or anything like that... I don't know how to explain it.. but it just didn't feel right. Doing the round-about I felt like it was definitely coming from the front end... which obviously is the only remaining portion I have functional...

I am now thinking that my little 3-wheel drive incident that exploded the intermediate shaft did a bit more damage... I don't know if it there is any issue with the ring/pinion, maybe a bearing starting to sieze or something after I dumped all the fluid out of the hole and drove it out of the trail, possibly screwed up spider gears... I don't know.. but it would kind of sort of explain this weird feeling I've been getting out of the front end around 40-45mph that I don't recall being there all the time, and also sometime coming to a slow stop while starting to cut the feel... things felt.. kind of jagged up front some times...

My next step I guess is to put in my rear driveshaft.. yay.. and then pull the RCV's out of the front (and hope like hell I dont' tear any boots), maybe disconnect the front driveshaft... because... lets face it.. why not? More than likely the diff will be coming out.. or maybe i'll leave it in, and drive 4wd to see what free-spinning the diff sounds like? We'll see....

I guess I do get to use the front stub shafts a lot sooner than I expected... FML... here we go again.. lol. If it is the front diff... I will be absolutely baffled... I've driven this damn thing for MONTHS after the rebuild and even back to hit the trails, in 4Lo, with lockers engaged and all.... Time will tell I guess.... and there's a good chance that I'll be RWD only for a while... but hey.... could be a perfect time to find a buyer for the LC200 rack and go back to stock

[aemravan]

quick update on my slowly dying build thread.. been busy with a house remodeling project so haven't had too much time to devote to the 4runner, but, I did have a chance to do a bit more troubleshooting..

I made another couple of quick test drives in FWD and can confirm that there is definitely a noise coming from the front end. However.. the impression I got this time around is that maybe it's coming from the drivers side RCV axle... I'm probably wrong, but something just doesn't feel right with it. When making a left hand u-turn around the cul-de-sac at a certain throttle input I can feel a repeated "thud" of some sort.... again.. enough to make me not want to experiment further at the fear that i'll drop my front diff in the middle of the road and be left with no drive, lol.

This is the same axle that was rebuilt by RCV already.. so who the hell knows.. maybe it just sounds that way, but something, somewhere in the front, is certainly not happy.

My next thought is to go grab just a cheap autoparts axle and swap it out on the drivers side and see if the noise is still there. If it is, I'll drop both front axles and see if I can eliminate the noise that way, which would then point to the diff definitely being the issue.


In other news, after making a 2 hour round trip today and having a nice back massage courtesy of my never ending balancing issue, I said f**k it and placed an order for 5 Kenda Klever RT tires. I thought I would be going down a size, but the 10.5 is just too drastic of a change and I think I would have hated the narrow tire look from the front and rear... I opted to stay the same size I am now... 35x12.5 r17. They should be here this week and I'll see if I just made another 1500 dollar mistake or not chasing something that I probably COULD accept to live with.. time will tell. I'm hoping I can at least get around 700-800 bucks for my wildpeaks.. they have been great off-road... just not for a daily street driven rig.

[aemravan]

The meat is here… now just to find time and a shop to swap these over and hope like hell my balancing issue is gone

And then figure out what the hell is clunking .. can’t wait ..





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[aemravan]

well, looks like I'll have to wait until next wednesday to get these installed. Rolling the dice on a discount tire near the house that one of my coworkers that is running an identical tire setup has had good luck with but they are booked up for a bit. This will be the priciest tire swap/balance that I've done.. $210 with tax for 5. Not too terrible but seemed a little high so we'll see, hopefully they can get it right. I feel bad for the tech taking off the old tires with all the balance beads inside.. but it must be done.


If I have some time tomorrow morning I am thinking about pulling both front CV's and installing my stub shafts just to see if the clunk is really coming from the rear or if the front also has something to do with it.. hell, maybe I have something out of whack front and rear, who knows.

A part of me wants to tear into the passenger side rear wheel bearing/axle just to make sure that my recent change to the nitro axle is still happy and the snap rig on the bearing collar is still in place and happy because at the moment I am completely lost as to what this noise could be, but sounds bad enough to want to track it down and not just let it be... I have very low confidence in the rig at the moment, which is a bit of a shame since it started super reliable, and in my pursuit of making it more trail "resistant" I may have done the complete opposite.

[phatcheeks]

Originally Posted by aemravan

The meat is here… now just to find time and a shop to swap these over and hope like hell my balancing issue is gone

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Im running the Kenda Klever ATs right now. Great tire for the price. I like them better than my Falkens so far.

[awhitney1]

Meaty tires!! Keep the motivation going on this build and eager to see if you ever dial in where that clunking sound is coming from.

Originally Posted by aemravan

The meat is here… now just to find time and a shop to swap these over and hope like hell my balancing issue is gone

And then figure out what the hell is clunking .. can’t wait ..





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[awhitney1]

BTW, those 35s look small, I would have gone 37s

[aemravan]

Originally Posted by awhitney1

BTW, those 35s look small, I would have gone 37s

I no joke almost just say screw it and ordered 37's since I was upgrading anyway lol. But I decided to stay logical for the time being and get 35's..

They are meatier than I anticipated.. can't wait to get these on and hope like hell they can balance them out perfect.



One thing I was thinking about with regards to the clunking noise on my drive back.. it seams to be not only load related, but I believe suspension travel related as well... that got me thinking... I have adjustable links... I have been screwing around with moving my axle back.. is it possible that my pinion angle at the rear diff is out of whack and when I go full load/squat the combination of the 2 is causing the driveshaft to bind? Seems too good to be true to be the actual problem.. but that's what came to mind today.. I need to take a closer look at my angles tomorrow but from a quick glance I believe my diff is currently pointing slightly upwards..

One thing I can say for sure looking back over the past 2 weeks of my post is that I discovered the clunking noise 3 days after I did my rear link heim>bushing conversion.... maybe this isn't a coincidence and I may be on to something..

[aemravan]

a quick update after screwing around with the rig for a few hours this morning..

-greased the drive shaft u joints and yoke
-adjusted rear links to zero in the pinion angle to match as close to the transfer out as I could
-removed/temporary deleted the passenger side parking brake assembly (FML.. can't wait to put this back together)
-pulled the passenger side axle assembly out to inspect the bearing retaining collar and snap ring ( i couldn't get the original snap ring back in place with the nitro axles so I did a little grinding to it. Ever since I have been scared that it will pop off and the collar would back off, after inspecting it looks like there is 0 chance for that to happen.. .I bent the 20 ton press getting this thing pressed on so regular wheel load is impossible to induce this sort of force. Everything is still in place)

Got everything reassembled and took it for a drive. Clunk is still there. This means I have ruled out anything with the parking brake assembly catching, wheel bearing/collar slipping, driveshaft needing to be greased.

What I did find that was really interesting is that throwing it into 4wd I could not get the clunk to produce itself. I laid into the throttle pretty good, even with lockers engaged, to the point where I had enough squat and torque steer to pull me to the right... no clunk....

so.... I think I'm onto something... this was obviously originally a fulltime 4wd rig.... after my FJ T case I have been running RWD only except the 2-3 times on the trails.. is it possible that I am over-stressing my old driveshaft? Either way, I think I can pretty confidently say that whatever is clunking is definitely torque-input related. Going 4wd and effectively cutting the torque to the rear by 2 seems to not have any issues.. I think what I will do is order some new U-joints to replace in the rear shaft and see where that gets me.. I can't imagine that something in the diff itself would be clunking.. I managed to grab a different angle with my go pro of the clunk. One video with the clunk is 2hi, the second with no clunk is 4hi. Looks to be identical suspension movement just about so that should be able to be ruled out as well. And I would say the clunk definitely sounds to be related to rotational movement.


My GoPro Video - YouTube
My GoPro Video - YouTube


Edit* Ended up browsing Ebay and settled on a set of Dana Spicer rear joints. It says they should fit my rig.. so we'll see when they come in later next week. I will be ecstatic if this ends up being the issue I was having all along.. maybe the combination of being damn near 7k pounds, running giant tires, and switching from 4wd to pretty much permanent 2wd with 150K+ miles on the original driveshaft is the culprit here..

[aemravan]

Decided to pull my drawer out to fit the tires for my Wednesday appointment… now I’m not sure I’m going to put them back in.. going to see if I can sell the set locally in favor of just using some heavy duty totes to pack out my camping stuff when I got the 3 times a year i make it .. I have a tire table that could work perfect for a gas grill.. not as handy as the pull out drawer with it already there.. but I feel like it takes up way too much room for daily activities..




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[rdruss]

Your "clunk" is definitely odd. Kind of sounds like a clunk-clunk.

[aemravan]

Originally Posted by rdruss

Your "clunk" is definitely odd. Kind of sounds like a clunk-clunk.

I’m really hoping it’s the rear driveshaft … we’ll see when the Dana splicer u joints show up I guess…


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[aemravan]

Spent a couple of hours and $200 at Discount tire last night after work. The Kenda's are on and fingers crossed so far so good.. The guy said they balanced out perfect, though after looking at one wheel it definitely required quite a bit of weights. We'll see how these do throughout the week, but so far it seemed to be smooth cruising on the way to work.

I am definitely feeling some sort of weird vibration from the front drivetrain.. it has to be either RCV axle or front diff related. Or maybe I'm just crazy but it's on my to-investigate-further list.

The driveshaft Ujoints are on their way for delivery today or tomorrow and I'm hoping to make some time to swap those out to see if the clunk goes away. After that I'll be tearing the front end apart to either remove the RCV's and put in stub shafts, or replace one side at a time with an Autozone or Napa cv axle and try it again in FWD. Fingers crossed I can get to the bottom of a few of these issues in the next week or two.

[thegame7]

Mine clunks every time when I come to a stop and its 100% the rear driveline slip joint. I keep meaning to get a high moly content grease to fill it with because normal grease breaks down pretty quickly. And the problem is harder to fix with grease the longer you go without greasing it since the splines wear down and the tolerances loosen up.

The design doesn't really lend itself well to getting grease completely pumped into the splines either. The fitting is at the top and there is a big void that needs to be filled first, then you see the driveline extend and stop then think the splines got grease but they don't. I pulled my slip yoke apart, shoved grease in both sides of the splines and put it back together. Worked for a little while and the clunk is back If you want it gone for good, buy a completely new driveline with a new slip yoke and keep it greased regularly. But the high moly content grease in the splines may work good, the slip yoke definitely needs different grease than u joints!

[aemravan]

So a quick update on my clunk.. got my Dana spicer u joints and swapped them out. As I had feared.. the clunk was still there.. but.. something about it changed.

It doesn’t seem as consistent now and doesn’t last as long when I hammer down in 2wd. Still gone in 4wd.

So the joints seemed to be ok.. since the old ones seemed to be smooth when I pulled them out.

The only thing that I can think of is possibly the slip yoke splines….? Could it be that they are a little worn and rough and under heavy torque as the squats and wants to compress the splines it binds a little ? Aside from the u joints the only thing I took apart was the actual slip yoke… maybe something about taking this apart is what contributed to the sound difference I’m seeing ?

One positive thing I guess is that I can just about confidentially say that it’s driveshaft related.. I mean it has to be since the characteristics of the clunk changed and it was the only thing I messed with ..


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