i was thinking of getting a difrent drop out center section for my ford 8 inch housing , i was talking to Randy,s Ring an Pinion ,they seem to exclusively use Yukon Ring an Pinions , Yukon posi units , and Yukon Parts ... they seem a little on the pricey side $$ ,i have no experence or knowldge of Yukon parts ,i was wondering an asking the maverick Forums ,what they thought of Yukon products and $$,s and how they compare to the market out there....
Yukon makes nice stuff. I have used Yukon ring and pinions and axles for a bunch of my Jeep builds. The stuff holds up well.
I mostly see the 4x4 guys around here using Yukon stuff so it must be tough.. Other than that if you take a walk around in te pita at the races you will see an abundance of strange & moser set-ups... I myself have Richmond gears, strange spool & moser axles.. All in all I'd run the Yukon stuff as well but if the price is too much maybe shop around for a different brand?
yukon is the in house brand made by randys. when they first started making diff parts they were junk, noisy gear sets, i saw to axle failures that should not have failed. all their stuff are copies of other products on the market.
I have a friend that off-road races and rock crawls that is sponsored by them. He's happy with their parts and hasn't had any failures that I'm aware of. He gave me a set of 4.11's for a 9" that were cryo treated and they look great. He also gave me a new set of 31 spline axles that fit a full size pickup that are nice looking pieces but useless to me, a bit too wide for my application.
I'm using a Yukon gearset and it's a little noisy. Called their tech support and they gave me the song and dance on setup but I roll a perfect pattern and preload is right in the middle of spec. They finally admitted that they won't be as "quiet" as a factory gear since they consider them "race" gears but I wished that I had known going in. It seems to be holding up for now and the noise hasn't changed one bit since I put it in and adjusted it 4 times just to make sure it wasn't an installation error. I'm also running a Steeda shifter on the transmission and it transmits noise like a megaphone too, so the rear might actually be quieter in an automatic car. There just aren't that many choices for 8" axles anymore. Some of my racer friends say they have good luck with them as far as toughness goes, for what it's worth.
Yukon is good I first found out about that brand when I was offroading with a Toyota That and sierra brand was the off road crowds choice Where as us gear seems to be allot of car guys choice. The grizzly locker is a better/stronger version of tthe eaton/Detroit locker with a way better warranty Another diff to consider is the platnium track gear torsen unit if you want a strong unit with great street manners
Us. gear will most likely be the quietest gear set I have its either motive or precision ..forget which..but it's pretty quiet in my buick
us gear went out of business around 2005. some other company has revived it. i havent had any of the new ones to install and evaluate. sierra is a low cost ok gear set. some will be noisy some wont motive has 3 lines white box, blue box and orange box. the white box is the budget line. it gets what ever is left over from the other lines so it could be junk, standard or the performance gears. the blue box is considered stock replacement, and the orange box is considered performance. motive has purchased richmond brand and now richmond boxes have the same gear sets and motive performance gears. none of motive gears are as good as old school richmond or us gear were. yukon has sent my shop 3 sets of 8.8 gear sets claiming that they are now quiet and we install them in our shop truck and they are not quiet. randys ring and pinion have high pressure sales guys that will say anything. to claim the the grizzly locker is better than a detroit locker is typical of yukon. the eaton rep who comes by my shop claims that yukon uses eatons internal parts in there own cases. randys ring and pinon is like the wallmart of the differential parts industry. they are low cost over seas clones of american made products.
