Confused about gears / differential? This may help
 

Recently I've been delving into the idea of new gears on my SS M6 until I realized, I really had no idea what gears would be best or how they even really worked. I used the search to pull up a bunch of threads that I sifted through for info for hours and I realized a lot of other people seem to be confused about gear function too!

Anyway I stumbled on this video by accident and although it is a bit archaic, it's actually pretty informative check it out,

Skip to 1:50 though

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4JhruinbWc

oh and I think 3.91 gears are what I'll end up going with!

Wow, that is an oldie. Interesting tho. Some things really havent changed.

Wow that was very informative! Thanks for sharing!

Very cool video. Thanks.

I want to go with 3.91 for my SS/M6 also but it's not as easy as it sounds. I've called a couple of car shops and neither of them would do the work. Hell I'm not even sure what I have to buy and I don't know how much work it is to simply change the gears. Is this a $500 labor mod, or $2000? Then someone on here said they have been waiting for 6 months to get into the dealer to recalibrate his speedo. How can I drive my car with an inaccurate speedo without getting a ticket?

From what I've read on C5 the 3.91 gears are the best for the SS and makes a very noticeable difference. Personally I would like to find a place that I can drop off my car and they will install the 3.91 gears that they supply but I haven't found any one that is willing to do it. Rarely do I ever buy parts that something isn't wrong, either the parts or wrong or there was something I didn't order.

It seems like such a simply thing to change out a few gears but it sure isn't turning out that way.

Russ

Very cool.
Even a Neanderthal like me can understand this :)
Thanks for sharing.

This thread is now a sticky. :thumbsup:

Since this is a sticky now... Might as well ask a few newbie questions to have cleared up. This is the differential obviously, but if you swap to 3.70/3.91/4.11 etc gears... does that mean it changes the actual axle gear as seen in the video? And the 1LE gearing is different, per gear, not just the final drive of 3.91... where are those gears? Thanks!

please realize that changing your gears will throw off the speedometer and might throw off your computer - just a few problems with changing gears on new cars. I changed gears to 4:11 in my 85 IROC and had check engine lights go on and had to get a reducer for the speedo cable and was lucky to have overdrive otherwise my gas millage and top end would have suffered big time.

Very good video.