Originally Posted by
stealthmagic27
Thanks for the reply Jay, ill give everything a closer looks and try to find the tolerances. Ill post up a quick video of the movement etc. Hopefully will give everyone a better idea. just seems too noisy when moving the drive axle and rear tires manually. I tried shaking the diff back and forth and cannot move the thing. The mounts seem good.
On your behalf, I checked out how much slop I have in the diff I just pulled on a transmission swap... On my 145,000, never touched unit it was pretty tight. Pinion slop was about 1/16 of an inch( how far the outer flange rotates). Dif slop was about 2X that. The two main areas where you can get slop are the ring and pinion and the differential. If its the ring and pinion, there are only a couple of causes. A trashed set of gears... If that's the case,I'm pretty sure you would hear them and get a lot of metal in the oil. The other would be if the bearing preload was off on either the pinion or the diff. Assuming the gears didn't get scored up, that is correctable. The down side is the cost of parts.
The other thing that can go wrong is if you have too much play in the differential bevel gears. You can feel that play if you turn one axle against the other. Easier to fix with just shims.
Short story: Ring gear play gets expensive very quickly.
Diff play, not as bad, I'm not sure how serviceable the Audi diff is, I have done mostly Mopar muscle car diffs.
My real advice? If you just want to get the car fixed, get a used unit. Most last forever and are a bargain compared to the cost of hard parts and labor.
If you want to learn how to rebuild a diff, go for it. I started setting up gears when I was a 20 something; It's a great skill to have. I have built several custom LSD units for my 4WD and even scored a Torsen for it. I have a few tricks that make setup and getting a good pattern easy. If you go that route let me know.
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