Gear Question

Whats the biggest gap you would run for gears. The lowest i can get my dana 44 and a 8.8 to match it 5.13 But i would like a little more. Lowest i can get them close is 44 5.89 and 8.8 5.71 Do you think the .19 is too far apart? Would only be offroad. with not too much dry rock around here.

Logic says it would be bad to have your back tires rotating faster then your front tires, even if it low speed rock crawling

my .02$

For an off-road only rig, that the owner admits will see little dry-high traction rocks? (And with those deep gears, I suspect he'll run largish tires) I doubt it'd be a huge problem.

Consider how different tire diameters work the same way :

Scenario 1: forcing the front or rear up into a ledge... momentarily the dire dia (working radius) decreases a bunch. For that instant, the same thing is going on.

Scenario 2: You blow two tires on the trail at the same time (rare? probably unless you are unlucky) and end up using a mismatch of borrowed spares to get out of the woods

#1 happens all the time on rougher trails, and it only sometimes ends up bad...

dsgray16 said:

Logic says it would be bad to have your back tires rotating faster then your front tires, even if it low speed rock crawling

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With the gears he listed, the rears would spin faster like you said, it would definately be more effective for the front to spin a little faster than the rear.

I am more worried about breaking stuff. I normaly run 10-12 psi up front, and 6-8 psi in the back tires. So that might be enough to even it out right there. Looking at somewhere in the 36-38" tire range. I would think running 4-5 psi less in the rear would even it out. thanks guys

ipkyss said:

I am more worried about breaking stuff. I normaly run 10-12 psi up front, and 6-8 psi in the back tires. So that might be enough to even it out right there. Looking at somewhere in the 36-38" tire range. I would think running 4-5 psi less in the rear would even it out. thanks guys

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I used 37" tire 2.72:1 low range in my ciphering, 1" less tire dia in the rear and they are pretty equal. (1.71 vs 1.72 mph @ 1000 rpm) Your varing psi sounds like the plan.

They should be within 1%.

For example, the difference between 4.10 and 4.11 is 0.01. 0.01/4.10 = 0.0024
That's considerably less than 1%

The difference between 5.71 and 5.89 is 0.18. 0.18/5.71 = 0.0315
That's 3%. If all you run is mud it would be okay but it's really too much of a spread.

I go with .07 difference max.
at least thats what my gear supliers spec.
be forwarned though that you will probably void any waranty running the higher ratio.