I know it's been asked before, but i still can't decide what's best for me. I have an 87 pickup with a sas in progress. I have the stock 4.10s and 33" tires and a 5 spd tranny and stock 22R right now. It's not my daily driver, but I drive on streets frequently but rarely go over 60 mph. I would like to upgrade to bigger tires eventually, but that would be way down the road. I do a lot of mild rock crawling and trails, and see a lot of mud. The truck really has to try hard to pull over hills right now. What i want to know is if there's a huge difference in power between the 4.88 and 5.29. And if anyone has experience with both and which one they prefer. Thanks a lot!

 

A good rule of thumb is

4.10s up to 31 inch tires
4.88s for 33 inch tires
5.29 for anything larger

As far as my experience 4.88 with 33s is the same as 4.10 with 31 inch tires. You go deeper in the gears with 4.88s but the larger tires balance it back to what the 4.10 with 31s in my opinion.

A friend of mine had 5.29s with 33s and in my opinion it was just to low geared for the 33s and the motor was always reved up.

 

I would personally go 5.29 unless you had a non-stock 22r pushing your truck. There's lots of gear and RPM calculators out there so you can figure stuff out, but when I had 4.88s with 33s I thought it was great everywhere but on the highway, since RPMs were a little higher than I liked. 5.29/33 should be a very similar combo at least according to the calculations. Also, since you're planning to up tire size in the future, wouldn't make sense to do your gears twice. I really noticed the benefit of the lower gear ratio when I was taking off from a stop with a truck load and when offroading in low gear, so much more control. For mud I can't comment since I don't feel the 22r has enough power to spin tires and clear out mud regardless of gearing, so I avoid it. Either way, even with 4.56 you should have an easier time going up hills if you go lower gears.

 

Agreed with Terry's post. I've had the 4.88/33 combo and it was fine. But, if you're going to go with bigger tires in the not-to-distant future you might just want to slap in the 5.29's. A gear change is not cheap, and the diff chunk in the front axle is kind of a pain as well.

I have 5.29s with 35s. It's geared a bit lower than stock. So the speedo reads higher than what I am actually doing. I find with this combo the rpms are a little higher than I would like at highway speed, but out here in CO with tons of hill climbing it's a tradeoff I will take. (I could actually use a 6 speed I think, haha)

Beware though with the 33s and 5.29s you won't be doing a lot of highway driving. Revs will be sitting pretty high.

 

I recently went from 4:88 with 33's to 35's. Not bad at all, I can tell a small difference. I will regear if I step up any more in tire size.

 

I think if I had less hills and more highway to deal with I would have gone with 4.88 with the 35s. Would def get better gas mileage.

All told, the difference going from 4.10 to 5.29 will be seat of the pants. You'll love driving around town with that.

 

I put 5.29's in all my Yotas 33's to 36's
I had a little prerunner with half wore 32" mickey bajas with 5.29 gears and it was a tire boiler.Lots of fun,but was screaming at 65mph it seemed.very fun in the dunes and fast sand trails though,never without power

 

https://www.yotatech.com/forums/f116.../#post52293847

fallow the link and read the math. The math does not lie.