US Gear manufactures a variety of products at their Chicago, IL facility, including US Gear/Strange high performance gear sets, Torq-Line axles and gear sets for light trucks, Dual Range overdrive/underdrive units, a power chip for Ford PowerStroke diesel engines, and the D-Celerator diesel exhaust brake.
US Gear was founded by Joseph M. Garfien in Chicago, Illinois. Joe came to America from the United Kingdom as a soccer player for the Austrian National Team in 1928. After a long career in gear manufacturing, Joe founded US Gear in 1952. US Gear is now a major OEM gear supplier and has earned Ford's Q1 quality certification.
My tour started at US Gear's warehouse. This is where their offices and some warehousing are located. Here I saw some quality control checks and a LOT of high performance parts for a variety of applications, including a one piece axle replacement for the AMC Model 20 Jeep axle.

US Gear also operates HTC, Heat Treat Corporation of America. Upon leaving the warehouse facility, we took a ride to the area near Pullman, Illinois, on the southeast side of Chicago, where Pullman rail cars were once built. This is where HTC heat treats their drivetrain components as well as parts for many other products, such as railcars.

The plant tour really inspired confidence in US Gear's product. First, a gear set manufactured by US Gear is a US Gear set. They don't farm out any of their own work. Also, they purchase a consistent supply of domestic steel, and do their own heat treating. They are original equipment manufacturer (OEM) suppliers for Ford's LSDs in their 9" axles, and for the gears in ARB (Andrew, Bolger, Brown), among others. US Gear prides themselves on consistency of setup. While that doesn't necessarily benefit an individual swapping one gear set, it is a great help for OEMs. They also supply a full line of ring and pinions for axles that they don't directly support. In such cases, they supply the OEM parts for those axles. They also supply install kits.

A solid gear is first made of the correct material (metallurgy) and second must be made correctly. Metal can be cast, forged, extruded, annealed, etc. The point is that stresses will collect in a flaw in the forming of a part, or will break at a flaw in the metallurgical structure of even a properly formed part.

US Gear controls their metallurgical properties by doing their own heat treating. For a ring and pinion set, this means that the gear teeth have hard steel at the edges (like the enamel of a tooth), and softer, less brittle steel providing strength beneath that hardened edge. Second, they roll axle splines and cut gear teeth with sufficient precision to avoid introducing structural features, such as sharp corners, where stresses can collect and break the part. Quality control procedures abound.

In addition to considering US Gear for your ring and pinion needs, don't neglect the rest of your drivetrain. For my recent project, I also replaced my original axles with a pair of US Gear's Torq-Line replacements. Inspection of the originals showed visible wear at the axle splines compared to the replacements.

The ring and pinion sets chosen for my recent project, along with the axles, have quality which can be expected to last as long as the originals - over 330,000 miles.

In a recent project I described how I installed a US Gear ring and pinion set and a pair of replacement axles in the rear axle of my 1983 Dodge Ramcharger. I have since driven my truck over thousands of highway miles and quite a few off-road miles. I am confident that these replacement parts have quality which can be expected to last as long as the Chrysler originals - over 330,000 miles. US Gear products are a confidence-inspiring part of any drivetrain project.