I just pulled apart my high-pinion Dana 44 front. The spider gears were absolutely trashed. I had extras lying around, replaced them. The ring gear is OK but my question comes with the pinion. It is chewed up a little bit. When I rotate the whole assembly, it binds up just a bit. It hardly needs any force to get past that point. If I run it that way, am I just going to do more harm? I know my best bet would be to replace the pinion, but they seem to be hard to find. Any input would be great.
Thanx

i personally would recomend finding or replace it with a new one.if you decide to run it the way it is may cost you more than you bargained for.been there done that.it saves the hassels.i have blown 4 rear diffs in two years with the 4th one 2 weeks ago.i'm getting so sick of replacing them.so i'm getting a bullit proof one built.new.

i have one for a 4:10 and a 3:07. if either of those help ya let me know by private message

you cannot replace just the pinion gear as they are a matched set. you have to replace the ring and the pinion gear together. that would be your best bet but being the front diff its prolly not used much and i would say if it aint broke dont fix it. haha but its up to you.

Ya Racerjim Jims right if you miss match the set then you get one hell of a howl when in 4wd but if its full time then the howl will be there all the time.

Chances are it will just machine itself over time. I'll tell you a funny r&p story though... My buddy Marty bought a 14 bolt diff of a board member with what were supposed to be 4:56 gears. Slapped'er in and it worked great, no wierd noise vibration nothin, decent increase in bottom end, perfect right? Pulled the cover afert a couple a weeks to drain, clean, inspect, blah blah, and he noticed that stamped on the ring gear was 41-11 (3.73 for the layman). but looking further he found that the gearset was using a 9 tooth pinion! So while 41:9 is 4:56, and 41-11 is 3:73, how the hell does a hienz 57 like this hold together (let alone work smoothly)? Now just to make this even more unusual, my buddy frenchy has the same set-up in his 86' flatdeck dually. Marty says that the pattern looks ok, and that the backlash is within spec, but I'm not sure how thats possible....

if you look at gm and there way of getting gear ratio's it is common for them to use the same no of teeth on the crown and change the number on the pinion just as you described. they get the ratio they want and don't loose the size of tooth on the crown. with the mass of the pinion they can afford the lose in size of tooth. it works great. as long as you don't try to mix crowns and pinions most often that results in the howl broncomarc talked about. but like he said in the front who cares?? at 5km/hr who is going to notice.