Rear Differential Gear Swap on Ford F-150

Chris Duke: I'm Chris Duke and today on Motorz I'm going to show you how to do a gear swap on a 2005 Ford F150 MOTORZ. Chris Duke: Changing the gear ratio in your rear end is been a mystery for a lot of people and no one is fully covered the installation on video. Understanding how these parts work together is important to know as well so today on Motorz we're going to show you how to install some after market gears in a rear differential on a two wheel drive 2005 Ford F150 Truck. Now here in Southern California the area is covered with hills and mountains and having a lifted truck with start gears makes the truck struggle quite a bit more especially when you are towing. Now increasing the gear ratio in the rear end helps at low end torque and the lower rpms where you needed the most. For out truck right here with 35 inch tires we decided to go with 456 ring and pinion gear for a motive gear a rear differential cover from PML for a 975 rear end. Royal purple 75 140 gear oil and Diablosport trinity programmer to help correct our speedometer and add even more power. Now before we get to the installation let's take a quick look at how your rear differential gears really work. MOTORZ. Chris Duke: Now the two parts that we're replacing are the pinion gear which is this guy right here as well as our ring gear. Now how this works as you've got a drive shaft so when you step on the pedal it turns the drive shaft and what's attached to the drive shaft is this pinion gear attaches right here with the flange which you will see a little bit later. So inside the differential housing is this pinion gear and it attaches to the ring gear this larger guy inside, it turns like this kind to near the bottom. So we're going to be upgrading our gears to 456 gears now that ratio is referring to the number of teeth, in this case there is 4.56 times the number of teeth on a ring gear as our pinion gear. Now inside the differential housing this guy actually sits up here like this and turns a bunch of spider gears which are attached to your axles and the axles are struck in through the sides and that's what get your wheels moving. MOTORZ. Chris Duke: Now for this installation you're going to need a lot of tools including a floor jack and a couple of jack stand some work gloves and a ton of rags. A quarter inch, a three inch ratchets, various screwdrivers, some needle nose pliers, a hammer, a breaker bar, a pry bar, a torque wrench, a sharpie, various extensions for your ratchets, sockets ranging from three eights all we have till 11/16 in metric and standard as well as some wrenches ranging from a quarter inch to a 11/16 in various sizes in both metric and standard some safety goggles, a putty knife, some red lock tape and a gasket scraper. Now since this is such a specialized installation you're also going to need some special tools and the biggest reason is for pressing on your new bearing on to your pinion gear this is a one shot deal so you have to do it right. Now you can take those items to a shop that has a press and have them pressed on before you or you could do yourself by getting your own shop press like our 12 ton that we have right over here, but you're also going need a bearing puller and separator set. Now one suggestion that we have is actually pick up an extra set of inner and outer bearings and then carve them down on the inside with a dremel that will allow you to slip these on and off while you adjust those shims and you can do go that wrought or you can get a ring and pinion setup tool but this is a lot easier and you're going to get it right the first time also you're going to need a four inch gear puller as well as the bearing race and seal driver set. For motive gear we've got the 456 ring gear the corresponding pinion gear as well as the crush seal along with both outer and inner bearing with matching races, some lock tight paint, and RTV instant gasket, some additional bearings, pinion nuts, a crush seal, a bunch of shims and replacement 13-16 bolts for the ring gear. The pinion is also hook this up with a new rear differential cover with all the necessary hardware as well as the transmission pan which will show you how to install in the future episode of Motorz. Now to begin with our gear swap we've got to get our sway bar off now we've already done that we've took our hellwig sway bar off and to learn how to do that just refer to our previous episode on that next thing we got to do is, we got to get this rear differential cover off but before we get to that we got to check that fuel plug which is on the front side here so grab a 3/8 inch drive ratchet and just see if you can wiggle it lose because we want to make sure that we can removing that later because we're going have to put some fluid back in there. So once you have tested that out grab a drain pan and some newspapers fit this guy up here and we're going to remove all these bolts except for the very top one. After removing all the bolts but there is one at the very top, grab a putty knife or a screwdriver and a mallet and you want to break that old seal by sticking this in there bang it away there you go. Oh, yeah, oh yeah, yeah it smells wonderful, now using some paper towels or some older rags you want to clean up the rest of this fluid in here and get that out there, now lets take a gasket scrapper like this which is basically just a razer blade or you could just use a razer blade just be careful and you want to scrap off all this old RTV seal it's on here. Now with that rear differential cover remove not a fluid drained on out of there we've got to disconnect this drive shaft, so grab a 12 millimeter 12 point wrench you can use a socket, if you don't have a socket so you are asking to use another wrench to leverage in order to pull these off. It's like that before you get too carried away you want to take a sharpie or some paint and mark right here between this bracket and the flange right here and right here for alignment later when you put this all back on. You also might want to tie up your drive shaft so it doesn't fall down on you so just grab some string with that. Now once you have those four 12 millimeter bolts removed this bracket might be little rusted on there so you can use a rubber mallet or a small sledge hammer break it lose and using that string and your strap and pull your drive shaft up out of the way next thing we need to do is we need to remove this flange from that pinion gear. With the one and 1/8 inch socket and a breaker bar remove this pinion nut, use a four inch gear puller to remove that flange. Now before we can remove our differential we have to move our axles out a little bit in order to do that we have to remove our wheels and all of our brake components. Remove the brake caliber by using a 10 millimeter wrench for removing these two bolts right here. Now if this rotor doesn't come off like you wanted to with a rubber mallet that's because you have got some parking brake shoes that are on the inside of this drum that are pressing against and plus you've also got a whole bunch of rust inside there so you can also try banging on the front and side to loosen up some rust. But actually there is a grommet on the backside of the dust brake seal back here and so you want to remove that grommet and then take a flat weight screwdriver and adjust the tensioner that will give you some wiggle room to take this thing off. Male Speaker: Turn it. Chris Duke: There it goes. The first step in removing the differential is to remove the center pin right here to do that we need to remove this bolt right here with a 3/8 inch wrench. As you can see on the inside here the ends of both of our axles now what we're going to do is we're going push on this one we just going to push it a little bit we're going to remove this one C clip that's right there. Once you have that one out, you can do the other one and also you've got both of those out of there we can back up our axles just enough to clear the differential. Next you want to remove these four bolts here on these clamps that hold the differential on place so grab a breaker bar and a three quarter inch socket and remove them. Thank you for watching this episode of Motorz! It's not over yet, though... You should watch the the rest of this episode which includes the rest of this install, funny outtakes, and so much more! To watch the rest of this episode just visit our website and we'll hook you up!. www.motorz.tv. Chris Duke: Oh, oh, oh look at the smell there I get this smell that too. I did not want to be here right now where I'm, I will be honest. Bye Fred.