I havent made a lot of progress lately on the truck between work and family, but i have been doing a lot of research on rear ends and trying to make a decision on what i want to build/run. My first, obvious choice was a 9"....but 9s kinda suck.
I definitely dont want a semifloat rear end, so i decided if i was to run a 9 it would have to be a 35 spline, disc brake, full floater, in a fabricated housing. After pricing out several options from different companies I decided that the amount of money i would end up spending on a ff9 was going to be more then i was wanting to spend. After looking into a few other options i decided that a 14 bolt is the direction i want to go.
I looked into 5 lug hubs for the 14 bolt, but I decided to swap the front end over to 8 lug to match the rear after i got my hands on a factory disc brake "metric" 14 bolt. This axle is a tab bit wider then the older 14 bolts and will come close to matching the track width of my extended ttb front end.
So now that i have an axle, next week ill be ordering up 4.88s, an install kit, and a yukon grizzly locker. Once the axle is close to going under the truck it will be getting a truss also. The first part showed up today for my axle....it was supposed to show up bare though...not green