I was working on the rearend, but had to stop and finish painting a few parts. Since Mother Nature controls the temperature in my "paint booth", it has been a little too cold to paint. I saw a window in the weather, so I figured I had better take advantage of it.

There were a few more parts left to paint than I had thought, but I think I have them all done now. Maybe I can make some headway on final assembly.

As for the rearend, it turns out that it was a carrier bearing and not a pinion bearing going bad. I went ahead and changed all the bearings since I had bought a Raytec kit that had them all in it. I did go with the posi and also swapped in the 3.42 gears out of the Camaro rearend. I may not like the posi after I start driving it, but I'll never know for sure if I don't try it. I do appreciate all those that gave their opinions on whether to use it or not.

The 3.42's will lower my cruise RPM's a little, but I don't think they'll hurt my performance too bad. With the 3.06 first gear in the 700R4, acceleration should still be plenty quick. Might even help my gas mileage a little.

The swap went pretty good and I only had to change the pinion shim 3 times to get it where I think it needs to be. The pattern looked good so maybe it won't howl like a banshee!

I did use a solid pinion spacer and shim kit instead of a regular crush sleeve. I really liked how easy it was to use and it's supposed to help keep the rearend together when you're beating on it. I don't know about that, but I'd use it again just for the ease of setup.

I also swapped out the pinion yoke. The old unit had a rubber mounted balancer on it. It was probably on there to dampen some unwanted harmonic vibration in the S-10 driveline. I doubt my 12" driveshaft has anything close to the harmonics of the original driveshaft. Not only that, but that thing weighed right at 10 pounds! The one on the Camaro weighed just a little over 2 pounds. That was an easy way to shed 8 pounds of rotating weight and drop a little unsprung weight to boot. All good in my book! Besides, from a safety standpoint, I have no idea what kind of RPM's that thing was rated for. It has the potential to spin at crankshaft speed(or higher in OD) and if it let go, there would be big hunks of cast iron flying around right under my butt! Probably not very likely to happen, but you never know.