quote:Originally posted by GT4Peter:
thanks for your answers, the zf specialist also say : when the car have only 100 HP no problem.
But with 500 Hp it will fail. Its only a metter of time :-( BUT : Nobody have seen a broken pinion in a ZF ! I spoke to so much people and all what they say is : a ring and pinion never broke.
Some of them changed a ring and pinion set, when it looks like mine now. But nobody hade a broken one.
So I guess the first " layer" / sorry for my english , I hope you understand the meaning/ is a hard metal. Maybe it is normal that a pinion looks like this after maybe only 5 years ? I know the safty factor in Germany bac in the days was a least 1:2 so the ZF can take more than 900 NM for a while. So maybe those parts will live longer than you think ?
when it realy break, It will break in the 5 gear at full throttle and only the theeth from the pinion. I guess that there is no massive ZF chrash. The broken parts will fall to the side on the bottom from the zf. The Ring and pinion is "allone" in the zf. No other parts are in their way. Maybe it will fail one time , but without Booom and bang ?! :-)
Is this betting time? Who holds the money?
My bet is that the nature of the failure will be, the top super hardened outer layer will flake on the contact patch.
It will cause a strange vibration in the transmission. It will get disassembled and replaced.
That's my bet.
You are making an assumption that if a tooth broke off of the pinion in a chunk, that it would fall to the bottom and not interfere with the operation.
What happens if the heat that causes the failure causes the piece of tooth of the pinion to stick to the ring gear?
That's called friction welding.
That was BossWrench's vision of the failure.
In that scenario, bada boom. Me? I'm not betting on that one at all. Odds are very bad on it but some times a 50 to 1 wins?