Hank the 36
Member
I'm a little nervous about the pitting. Any good comments are appreciated.
Based on what i can see in those pictures the profile of the gear teeth on both the ring and pinion looks good to me. It looks like mostly surface rust on the ring that will clean off. I don't believe the amount of pitting on the pinion teeth would cause any problems based on the way those gear teeth will come in contact in actual operation. Those pits may actually help keep some lube on the gears as they mesh. The ring appears to have 34 teeth and the pinion most likely has 9 teeth making that a set of 3.78:1 gears. Can't see the driveshaft end of the pinion gear, but if it has 10 splines that would be a highly desirable R&P set for early V8's with closed tubular type drive shafts. I have a matched set of 3.54:1 R&P gears that have pitting worse than yours and i am planning to use them in one of my cars. Pitted gears does not necessarily = noisy gears. There are many other factors which will create gear noise. IMHO, I would not hesitate to use those gears and if that is a ten spline pinion I would consider buying those gears from you if you decide not to use them.
Noise comes from excessive clearance at the pitch angle / diameter.Thanks for all of the comments. I'm wondering what makes the noise ??? I'm going to clean these up and show them to a local buddy of mine and see what he thinks. John your 100% right about the ratio, and they are 10 spine. My plan is to replace the 4.11 gears in my '36. If these are too pitted at least I didn't pay a arm and a leg for them.
Thanks,
H36
Butch, the tolerance on R&P sets is so close that they were machined in matched pairs. Confirm this by the fact that every set was etched with a matching serial number. There is no way that a hand sanding job could possibly improve or make up for pitting, and in fact, the problem would be worse after the polish job.