The Rear Axle – Ford 9”

 

My Comet originally came with the standard 71/4 four lug rear end and I knew I with the 289 I wanted to upgrade to something bigger.  I checked the internet and through www.recycler.com I found a Ford 9” that came out of a 1980 Granada.  From info I found on the internet, I knew that was the size I needed.

 

Here is a picture after I brought it home.  Boy is it heavy.

 

 

I came with Drum brakes.  The guy I bought it from said it was from a Versailles but I thought those came with disk brakes.  I think I’ll be changing it over to disk brakes before I strap it to the Comet.

 

 

Here’s the housing ready to be cleaned up and painted.

 

 

Here’s the housing all clean and painted a gloss black.

 

 

I cleaned and painted silver the 3rd member housing and the pinion retainer.

 

 

I bought a new gear set from Richmond gear through www.summitracing.com .  The original gears with something like 2.75:1 and I got 3.50:1 gears.  I think I might have gotten the wrong gears being that I have a C4 behind the 289 and this is going to be a daily driver.  Maybe I’ll just have to get another tranny with overdrive later on…

 

 

As part of the gear kit I bought, it came with new bearing raceways.  I had this pressed on at Dragmasters in Carlsbad.  The picture below shows me installing the crush sleeve. 

 

 

Here is the outer bearing…

 

 

…and the

 

 

I pressed on the seal and next installed the yoke and torqued it down past 200 Ft-lbs to obtain the preload the manual said I needed to have. 

 

 

No I didn’t install any type of posi or locking device….I’m thinking I can do that later if I decided I really needed it.  It would have been more for the cool factor if I had…

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the carrier with the ring gear installed.   Setting the gears took a long time to do.  I followed the directions to the tee setting the backlash each time before I checked the gear pattern.  This was my first time so everything I did was based on what I interpreted the directions to mean as opposed to having seen it done.   Being everything is so heavy, just taking the pinion retainer out every time to change out the shim just plain wore me out…

 

 

Here is the gear pattern getting closer.  I ended up with NO shims to get the marking in the middle.  Not sure if this is correct but I posted my questions on www.fordmuscle.com and some said that they were not surprise and other said they have always used at least some thickness of shimming.