angles for dana 44

Ive done hours of research on setting up my inner Cs, coil buckets and setting pinion angles, Im working with balistic fabs brackets and now I see why so many people buy the full truss from TnT. Can anyone drop some knowledge on me or point me in the right direction? Thank you

what exactly is it you are struggling with or need clarification on?

setting the proper caster and welding on my coil buckets and LCAs on at the right angles.

Well, to get all the numbers to work out, you also need to rotate the knuckles.

First off, ideally your pinion should be pointed at the dual cardan at the tcase. The problem with that is the fact that unless you rotate the knuckles, rotating the pinion up decreases your caster. So in an ideal world you would break your knuckles loose, rotate the pinion up and then set the castor by rotating the knuckles. Once you do that, then you would put your axle under the vehicle and set the front to back location, then mount the coil bucket so the coil points at the frame side location of the coil spring.

If you don't want to do all that work, you typically need to split the difference. Put the axle under the vehicle and rotate the axle housing to have the pinion pointing up as much as possible without killing all your caster. I don't have those numbers since my setup is totally different due to a wristed radius arm setup. I am going to rotate mine back down to increase the caster a bit because my rig wanders and does not want to go in a straight line (not enough caster).

Putting the axle in to measure would be almost impossible as its my daily now. Ive already cut off the outer Cs. So to set the pinion angle i need to measure the angle of the double cardian joint and match my pinon to that? Then once i have that I can set my outer Cs to roughly positive 6-7* then i need to set my coil buckets in at 0*. Am I missing something or am I looking good here?

there are a lot of variables here... high pinion vs low pinion, any stretch, desired castor, lift height, the list goes on. mocking it up under the vehicle is absolutely the best way to do things.

what i can tell you is that at ride height, my coils buckets on my 44 are not perfectly horizontal.

Trying to set an axle up on the bench and actually get everything right is near impossible. You need some reference points for measuring and they aren't all that easy to come by. It sounds like you're starting with a bare housing and the C's aren't welded on yet, which is an optimal situation. What is not optimal though is not being able to mock it up under the vehicle. With a dual cardan drive shaft you can't just measure the angle of the joint. You want the pinion to be pointed at the t-case yoke, which would also mean the pinion is in a straight line with the driveshaft. Unless you already have a matching D44 in the vehicle it's gonna be kinda hard to find that measurement as it will change with lift height and distance from the t-case to the axle.

That's the hardest angle to find. Once you have it you can work the rest from there. To be clear since people always get mixed up with positive vs. negative, caster should be with the knuckles rotated BACK, so the upper ball joint is slightly behind the lower.

All of this is why I generally say NO when someone calls me an says "I have an axle can you put all the brackets on so it'll bolt into my ______________" Without doing it on the vehicle the chances of getting it wrong are high, and if you get it wrong it's quadruple the time to remove and start again.