Ya, it all depends on the pinion height, I gather the low pinion will run the gears just fine, but the high pinion wants the reverse cut gears.It also could be that they only list that ratio as a standard rotation. That's basically gears that are cut for use in a rear axle, turned around and used up front. While you can do that (and most companies did until the early '80s), the ring gear drives on the high pressure angle side of the tooth (normally the side used in reverse or compression braking in RWD). This puts a lot more stress on the gear teeth, and is probably harder to set up to run quiet.
For those reasons, most 4WD front axles today use a reverse-rotation cut of the gears in the front axle. Basically, they use the same tooth geometry, but have a left-hand helix to the ring gear teeth instead of right-hand. That allows them to roll forward - with the pinion pointing backwards - while still using the low-pressure angle side of the ring gear tooth.
I would imagine that, if the spline and bearings are correct, you could still use the standard-cut gears up front. But it'll probably be noisier, and will put greater stress on the teeth over the long haul.
I might have to re-gear both axles, but that's really not the end of the world as a set of 4.10 or 4.56's is about $600 including everything to rebuild both... It's just double the work. Of course, that would mean that I am not limited to any specific ration, I could run 5.13's if I wanted.... For the "holeshot".
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