Towed to the nearest dealership, they opened it up and it's totally destroyed inside. Broken teeth on ring/pinion, schrapnel everywhere. Even all the components of the locker need to be replaced. Sounds like the only thing not completely wrecked is the housing, but it sounds like they might order a whole new rear end rather than rebuild. I have no idea what the initial failure was, like I said it was not making any noise on the highway, at least not anything louder than the usual 35's humming on the asphalt, and never showed any leaks of any kind, pinion seal, axle seals, diff cover, nothing. For the amount of destruction inside I would have expected some tell-tail "whirring" or jumping or something
To top it all off, when the mechanic called the Tech line regarding getting it covered under warranty, they started asking for pictures of my dealer-installed lift and 35's, and questioning my coverage. I am not very mechanically inclined, but I would find it hard to believe that my lift would be the root cause of this kind of total failure. The mechanic told me that he's going to do his best to get it covered, otherwise they are willing to tow it 200 miles to the dealership who installed the lift when I bought it new last year, to have them fix it (one perk of living in a small town I guess).
Any ideas as to what might have been the first thing to go? The only think I can think of is a couple teeth broke on the highway (or possibly before), and they banged around until filings got into the pinion bearing and chewed it right out at highway speed. Or maybe the bearing went first and pieces took out the gears? I don't know.
A co-worker had mentioned to me that he'd heard these 4.56's were kind of known for ring gear issues? I've never heard that before, so I'm going to take that with a grain of salt. Guess I'll just have to wait until after the long weekend to find out how much headache (and heart-ache) this is going to turn into lol.
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