Sense the bearing is already off, I don’t have any recommendations.
The shims are to allow for machining differences for both the pinion gear as well as differential housing.
On the assembly line, a different person does each thing. In this case one person measures and marks, the next person selects shims and installs, and so forth. The good news is with this process is things get marked (in this case with white numbers).
In the repair shop, nothing gets written down – for its all in memory.
If the bearings were still intact, a person could make tools to get the job done. It won’t be like using factory tools – but at least will get the job done.
Even when I worked in a Chrysler dealership, some special tools would walk off (Yes, Fred, I know that special-tool Miller Y-409, is locked in your bottom drawer of your toolbox . . .) so a lot of our tools were “created”, but got the job done.
What we do when we had a missing arbor is to use the next size smaller arbor (note finding a piece or section of steel (or thick plastic) pipe will work as well. Finding one the exact diameter might be difficult to do, but with one a bit smaller is not hard.
Cut the section of pipe to fit in the carrier bearings location. Then find some rubber or thin (but wide) fender washers. Place pipe in as shown in picture, then place fender washers (or rubber or whatever) between the pipe and bearing caps and tighten down caps.
That will place the pipe at bottom of channel and should keep it from moving.
Note: distance between pinion gear (or gauge block tool) to green line is what is being measured.
Next, take your two pinion gears – before bearing removal (well, actually, this goes before the pipe/arbor install) and measure the distance from gear to arbor/pipe. If distances are the same, then you can reuse the old shims. If not, then add (or subtract) to get correct shim(s) needed.
The nice part about using the factory set-up tools, is it is pre-setup, so the distance from tool and arbor is the exact thickness shim needed – which makes setup a breeze.
A person can still make a mockup of factory set up and use it to get an approximation of correct shims via measuring – but it is still - not exact.
These next pictures are all from my '77 Chrysler FSM, except for the color picture (above) which I drew up.
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