Maybe the ultimate first gen dodge rear differential?

I am building differentialas for my ramcharger, i wanted to do dana 60 front, i ran into a problem with trhe rear 60, but had a 70 i had cleaned up. I was looking into disk brakes, the general consensus on the afternarket brake kits is they don't work that well on a big tired truck and the big calliper kits lack a parking brake.
Then i found a 2nd gen dana70 on FB for a 100 bucks.
Some 1.5 inch shaft and some pucks on the lathe, a weeked of work and i have a 1st gen dodge diff proper width rear end with disk brakes and parking brake. I just sectioneds the axles so the hub measurement was right, and then reused the first gen axleshafts. All factory dodge parts too.
Next i'm machining some tall perches to eliminate the block.

Some more pics of the process. The 2nd gen hubs werent very straight on the tubes, i did a clean pass on them to true them up.
I put the join half way under the perch so i can bridge the tubes withe weld as well.

Pretty cool and probably cleaner than my disc swap. I just used brackets from Great Lake Off Road, Cut the spacers from tubing and used 3/4 ton GM front calipers and rotors. You can use Eldorado calipers for a parking brake but I just used a circle track hydraulic brake cut off valve (it's basically just a ball valve) in the rear brake line to use for a parking brake, works very well and it's tons cheaper than the Eldorado calipers, if you can even find them. Now you need a hydroboost.

Yeah, i did a lot of reading and talking to people about the eldorado parts. Apparentrly the parking brake cable bracket is a pain in the butt, some say there really isn't enough pad area for a heavy truck. I was just about at the point of giving up on disks was going to get a set of drums and backing plates jet hot coated to keep them looking nice when the 2nd gen diff popped up on fb marketplace. I wanted to keep a mechanical parking brake, i saw the relevance of it this year when it was -30c and the brake line the front of my 3500 snapped clean off, the pedal went straight to the floor and I stopped it with the parking brakes, scary as all hell.

Nice.

With parts and a lot of setup guidance from Dr.Diff, the disc brake 70 is done.
Its a real oddbal now, disc brakes, first gen width, 32 spline lsd with 5.13 gears. I couldn't even find a lsd with that carrier break and spline in the catalogs but dr.diff made it happen.
The new rear calipers have been on back order for 2 months.
On to the front 60 now.

Nice !

I never had the opportunity to put them side by side but, I believe that front calipers from a 97 E250 are the same as the 2nd gen dually disc rear calipers.

The brackets are different for sure but that's the difference between a knuckle and axle tube.

I picked up the callipers today, just sandblasted the old bolt heads and painted them. I like that the aftermarket callipers come coated now, saves stripping them down, sandblasting and powdercoating.
Working on the front 60 now, retapping the buggered grease zerks for the kingpins. I noticed the 70 has 9/16" wheel studs and the 60 front has 1/2" so I ordered some Chev k20 studs that are 9/16 for the front axle so I have matching lugnuts all the way around.