Antarctico

This past summer I picked up a complete Dana 36, batwing and all, with 3.07 gears off of ebay. My intention was to take the diff to Zip Corvette and have them do a rebuild using their Heavy Duty Dana 36 differential cover, but staying with the 3.07 gears. At the time I bought the diff, Zip was still showing the HD differential cover as available. Now that I have the time/cash to complete this little project, the HD cover is no longer being shown on their website.

Does the HD Dana 36 cover randomly appear and disappear from Zip's inventory? Or, assuming this train has left the station, is there another vendor that offers a similar HD diff cover? I had wanted to use Zip as they are only a few hours south of me. I had planned on motoring down I-81 and just handing the diff to them.

Benben

1-800-962-9632

Call them and ask when they're open.

drcook

I was going to do this myself. When I had the funds, they had disappeared so I contacted them. They ran out of the blocks that were originally sold to them by Ikerds. That is where the original design came from. The old guy that machined up the blocks has passed away, so there are no more.

Zip is currently in the process of doing a redesign. I have talked to them, including a PM to Justin Abbott (J. Abbott here on the forum). Here is what he PM'd back to me on 02/13/18.

For my purposes, this would be perfect, as I don't intend to launch the car from a start with slicks, drag race it, etc. I might do a little slalom type stuff with the club I belong to, but nothing to tear it up like a hard launch will do.

With that said, anyone here have one that they bought and never installed ? I would purchase it from you for what you have into it.

Antarctico

That was some useful info, thanks! Regarding slicks and all, my car is a street car with an automatic. Whatever mods I have planned are conservative. I don't need to do a whole Dana 44 swap. Also, because I want to keep my cabin noise under control, and I want to not totally destroy my highway MPG, the factory 3.07 final drive is all I want. Having said that, if I am going to have my ebay diff rebuilt, I want it rebuilt as strongly as possible just to reduce the chances of any unintended consequences when I do something...less than prudent.

drcook

I am hoping that they can come up with a solution soon.

Antarctico

I PM'ed Justin also and he replied:

It seems we will both have to delay gratification. What surprises me is that this is such a difficult thing to reproduce. I don't know why a known good differential cover can't laser scanned, the blocks created in a CAD program, and then 3D printed in plastic, and the plastic blocks used to create molds to cast the blocks in aluminum. You can read about a real world industrial example of casting from a 3D print here, and an example of some dude on Instructables doing it all on his own for an individual part he needed for his race car.