I'd feel better about it after I work through the stuff I'm dealing with on my junk first.
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Attempted to reinstall the same shims back in the spots I pulled them out of. Ring gear side shim shattered and I don't even consider the amount of force I was using excessive. I don't know if I posted a pic but it did have some damage from the race walking/spinning.
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Quick down and dirty tool to be able to press the inner pinion bearing back on.
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Drove new races in. Reinstalled the pinion temporarily back in the case. No seal, old crush sleeve and nut. Torqued until I got a drag I was happy with.
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Remaining old shim on the ring gear side, shimmed up the right side until I had no side to side play.
So here's where I'm at with this thing. In a previous posted pic you can see a gap between the inner pinion bearing and the pinion gear. This caused damage to the shim by allowing it to spin. The best measurement I could get from it was .026". I went with .030" because of the fact the shim was missing some material and felt it was as close as I'll get for now. And since I didn't crush a new sleeve or install the seal it's pretty easy to change later if need be and won't cost any more money in additional parts. How ever depending on what kind of pattern I get I may bite the bullet and buy a pinion depth gauge.
And as seen in this post, I completely fawked a shim up. About the 3rd tap and it desentigrated. Wasn't tapping on it directly, was using a brass drift and just moderate force. Walked away from it for a couple days after that. Both the old shims were in the .270+ range. And it was super tight. After the second tap I was pretty much committed, on the one that shattered the shim I changed direction because I did not like how tight it was. Pretty much locked the carrier up from turning. I inspected the bearings and races after, didn't see anything to suggest they wouldn't live. So with this it's obvious the new carrier is wider. With the pinion in and with a drag I'm ok with I set the carrier back in with the remaining old shimon the ring gear side. It only took .220 to take up the slack on the right side. With out caps it's stiff one way and starts binding the other direction. I got no back lash after snugging caps which were marked while pulling it down. From here I'm just going to swap the shims side to side to shift the ring gear over the .050" and see what that gets me.
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Edit: finished swapping shims around. Netted a backlash of .028" with the caps on. Kinda looking like I won't be using the remaining old shim. Not running a pattern at this point. Carrier needs to get shimmed more to the right and it's Jack and Coke O'clock.