73VetteKS

I’m asking this for a friend of mine. He has a mostly stock 81 Auto with about 80k miles. Sometime ago he started hearing a clicking noise from the rear while accelerating or maintaining constant speed. The clicking goes away when decelerating. He also thinks the noise goes away when turning, but he will have to verify.

All axle and drive shaft u-joints have been replaced, trans rebuilt (for other reasons), with no change to the noise. I recommended he check the parking brake area, but his mechanic said everything was ok.

Any suggestions?

SIXFOOTER

front diff mount?

Kalway

Tell him to take it on some hard turns and see if it's still there.

I had sort of a whining/clicking sound in the rear right of my '81 a couple of times. I did a couple of hard brake stops and turns and it went away.

73VetteKS

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll pass this to my friend.

73VetteKS

I should have thought of this earlier. I did a search for clicking, and found some other good suggestions. I'll pass the links to my friend.

73VetteKS

Per another discussion with my friend, I realized I had the symptom reversed. He hears the clicking from the rear when decelerating only. He does NOT hear the clicking when accelerating or maintaining a constant speed. I passed your recommendations to him along with the search results.

I will update this when he finds the problem. . . .

Van Steel

could it be possible that he only hears it when it decelerates b/c of the exhaust noise. Seems strange that something would be clicking when nothing has a load on it but when it does have a load on it he hears nothing. What kind of u-joints we used? Did they move around nice once they were installed or were they stiff? Is the noise a t high speeds? Can he let off the brake from a stand still and hear it while it coasts? The spindle flanges could be bad. Lately we seen a trend in the 80-82 cars where the spindle flanges have been rocking back and forth against the spindle splines causing a clicking noise as well.

RocketSapp

U-Joints... Under accelleration they are held in place and you will not hear much. When they are not under load is when they will start to rattle and make noise.

Same thing with my Surburban and my 89 Vette.

Tim