wannabe said:
damn it your scaring me. Hoping 4.56's will do me for a year or two.
Do you daily drive? That is the question. If you do, you may prefer 4.56's.
4.56's are fine with 35's on the highway. I like this combo because it keeps the tranny from "hunting" at around 60 mph, which it did when I had 33's on 4.56 gears. I tend to drive at about 60 mph in the back country because my rig doesn't like to drive much faster at my elevation (7,000 ft). It also hunted at about 45 mph, which sucked because that's a typical around town speed here. I like my 4.56's better onroad with 34x12.5 than I did with 33x10.5.
I'm in Colorado, though, and we suffer from altitude and constant hills, which accentuates this issue...not as big a deal for a flatlander. When I'm in the high country at 8,000 - 12,000 ft elevation I just lock out overdrive and run 60 mph at about 2,800 RPM, which is perfect. If my gears were lower, I'd be forced to run in overdrive or at higher RPM in 3rd gear. Leaving it in overdrive would cause constant hunting between overdrive and 3rd, which it did with the 33's and 4.56's.
I don't have the experience of choosing gears near to sea level, so keep that in mind. At altitude, the auto tranny seems to do best keeping the shifting points near stock (I've run 31's, 32's, and 33's and 34's on 4.56 gears), with a focus on low range reduction for offroad crawl ratio.
4.56's are a little tall offroad. They aren't bad...but you could definitely go deeper. Ideally you'd want a 4:1 case ratio (and maybe 4.3:1) if you plan to run 4.56's in the diffs.
Nay