well took the Toyota in the woods today and was climbing a washed out hill and got half way up with the tires spinning and then heard a loud metal pop.
well got home and took the manual hubs apart and nothing looks broke in the hubs. but passenger side cv shaft has a lot of play in it and there was moisture and rust inside the hub. but it only made noise when truck was in 4 wheel. any help or suggestions

 

Get the truck up on all 4 corners put it in 4 High figure out what you broke.

Did you break a CV Shaft??

Since you think it is in the front axle

Does every thing turn like it should??

With the front locked and in gear and on the ground can you spin the front driveshaft.??

When this happened did all forward movement stop??

Define alot of play??

 

well I went out and checked everything. pretty sure my ring and pinion are toast on the front diff

 

i'd take a good look at those axles again, i'd think they would break before the gears. with the front wheels off the ground, lock the hubs and spin each wheel at a time. if the gears are indeed trashed, there will be obvious noise from the diff and i would suspect it would want to bind up while turning.

 

If the front gears broke most of the time it would lock up because pieces are all over the place.

In any case I am sure you will find it when you start pulling it apart.

 

well drained the front diff fluid and well.. metal pieces came out look like half a tooth and a bunch of smaller chunks and a lot of crushed metal pieces

 

My moneys on the spider gears.

 

now I gotta find out how to fix it either spend the more money on a rebuild or find a working used one and just swap it

 

I have seen the pinion gear take chunks out of the ring gear before, if the backlash was wrong or the pinion bearing went. You should pull the differential out and look at it. Also unless you are experience with putting a differential together I would say look at a junk yard for another operating differential.

 

looking at my door jam looks like I have 4.56 gears in the truck and I think I might look for a complete front diff. or spend the money and take the time to SAS it

 

I would recommend a SAS. I did one for $1500 and took me about 70 hours all together. Worth every penny and every min though.

 

a lot of work though and i don't wheel that hard i don't think. mild rock crawling and mud

 

The reason I did a SAS was because I was having problems with the IFS. I was constantly losing my front end alignment and breaking my idler arm. This resulted in the extremely fast wearing of brand new cooper discoverer STTs I bought. You could just replace your control arm bushings (which I could only get at Toyota for $100 a piece). However I have found in my past experience can be very hard. In my truck I got the bolts out of the control arms fairly easy when starting my SAS. However my truck has very little rust. I replaced a friends control arm though and getting the bolt out of the bushing seemed nearly impossible. I ended up cutting the control arm with a torch which was no big deal cuz I was replacing it anyway. So I guess it is really the luck of the draw. I like the straight axle though. It really stiffens the front end up and you don't feel like your front end is going to fall out of your truck when you are really getting after it on the trail. The only thing is like I said it stiffens up your front end. Which means more bouncing around. But wear a seatbelt and in my opinion it is more fun. On the road it drives fine. I drive 1000 miles to college then 1000 miles back and it rides great.

 

Disregard the part about the bushings. I was thinking about another thread when writing that.