‘02 rear axle postmortem questions

[Pete99]

I recently posted about unusual noise on my ‘02 (Edge, 4.0, 4WD) that didn’t correlate well to speed or RPMs.

Finally I lost all power to the rear wheels yesterday. One rear wheel was leaning in slightly. Shifting into park made an exasperated rattling noise.

Got towed home, this is clearly the sign I have been looking for to call it a day with this thing, which is more rust than truck at this point.

What do folks think it sounds like happened? I was getting a very intermittent brief scrape sound the past week or two, which was becoming a more sustained scraping sound over the past few days. It was more pronounced at startup.

I really know very little about the rear end, I’ve been done most of my own work on the front end and under the hood. Just for curiosity’s sake at this point, I’m wondering what finally did it in.

 

[rusty ol ranger]

Axle shaft bearing went, wore the shaft down, shaft snapped.

200 bucks for a junkyard rear and an afternoon you could be truckin again.

 

[scotts90ranger]

If flat towed home on the road a broken axle doesn't sound possible since it would have ejected the axle shaft being C clip, but it's gotta be a bearing or spider gears...

If the rear diff is limited slip, I've seen it before (on my '00 Explorer when I got it) where the clutch packs were so worn out that the spider gears were just riding on the tips of the teeth and eventually took out a couple teeth, lost rear drive until things lined up just right, which got you somewhere with an AWD vehicle...

 

[pjtoledo]

noise while shifting into park means the driveshaft was still turning.
open it up and find out what broke, should be obvious now.