Rubicon Front Diff Shavings - What is Normal?

[Jeep4Win]

Looks no bueno to me too. Time to take that cover off and investigate.

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[word302]

The only thing that’s going to keep your sensors from failing is potting them. That said you’ve got something going on in that axle, especially if there were no shavings at 2k miles.

 

[Yawnie'sPapa]

Anything specifically I should look for? (just eyeball the gears?)

I'm far from versed in what a 20K mile diff should look like.

Shavings come from parts other than the gears. I've rebuilt a few customer differentials, one with blown pinion bearings had shavings very similar.
It could be from the axle tubes manufacturing process, but if you've seen a tapered roller bearing cage come apart, it's steel bent into curls and other cool shapes.

I've seen others give you the best advice - pull the cover, carefully with a plastic scraper, scrape out of the bottom of the differential housing. Clean it thoroughly.
On one of my cars (at 190,000 miles) I found a pinion seal leaking which led me to a worn bearing which meant I needed to pull the carrier to replace pinion bearings and when I took the carrier bearing caps off - I found spun spacers and chunks missing from bearings. Odd - it was a very quiet differential! That led me to scoop out the bottom of the housing with a scraper I made of old milk jug and that led me to another find - about 1/4" broken off of the right axle and laying in the bottom of the housing. To this day no one can explain how the end broke off - the INSIDE end, in the carrier side gear. Again, it was quiet and worked fine, I only pulled it apart because of a really tiny leak at the pinion seal and it was a show car, no excuses for any signs of a leak or seepage in judging.
Not all problems scream at you.
Then a guy brought me a model 20 differential that had blown out pinion bearings - he'd just had it rebuilt by a "reputable guy" in Kenosha. He made it out of town and WHAM.
There were a lot of metal shavings in there from the bearing cages.

 

[gato]

Thanks for the answers. I'll drive another 2K miles or so and take a look. It's interesting the comment from
@Yawnie'sPapa that shavings don't come from gears - that is what I was going to inspect.

Let's see what I find in a few months.

 

[gato]

In any case what is shown in the picture is not normal, break-in or not. The best case scenario is that the axle or other internal parts were machined in the factory and they simply didn't clean out the metal filings before installing....basically the chunks were just floating around in side the fluid.

But I already changed the fluid once (at ~ 1,000 miles) when I put in the G2/aftermarket diff-cover. Not sure it is manufacturing left over bits.

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