Hi!

I'm new here, but I belong to a couple of other auto bulletin boards, so hopefully I won't make a fool of myself in my first post!

We've had older Volvo's in our family forever (well, back to 1965 when my Dad bought his '65 P1800s - which he still has!) and I used to help Dad cup up 444's & 544's back in the late 1960's to build into race cars. We won a lot!

So I'm not a novice when it comes to cars or Volvo's.

I recently purchased a 1964 PV544 that was converted to a (1975?) B20 engine and automatic transmission back in 1991. The car has accumulated about 105,000 miles since then, so it's just now broken in good!

My problem is with the rear end (differential) gears. Actually two probelms: first, the ring and pinion gears were not set up correctly when they were last overhauled, and the lash offset has ruined the faces of the gear teeth. You can hardly hear the engine over the rearend whine. So I need to get a new (or at least good) set of gears.

The second part of the problem is that the builder retained the 4.11:1 gear ratio, which was OK when driving in San Francisco, but not good out here in the flat desert. So what I really need to locate is a good set of gears in a higher ratio - say 3.7-something or 3.55:1.

Now, provided I can locate said gears, does anyone have any words of advice about installation? My books indicate that they use the shim method of getting the clearances and lash set. I've done that once and it worked OK, and I've done lots of GM rearends, which use big rotating nuts as adjusters.

Any help I can get - either locating gears (or at least finding that 3.7-something ratio that I've forgotten!) or an entire rear axle assembly or detailed advice on disassembly/reassembly, or interchange information, I'd really appreciate it.

Steve
Southern California