The Sterlings have always had crush sleeves in them. The early ones had some problems with the crush sleeve crushing too much on its own under a lot of hard engine braking causing the yoke to loosen and wear the splines, and how did they fix it? They redesigned the pinion and yoke for longer splines! So let's not address the real problem, but make sure that once it does show up it won't do as much damage... Typical Ford logic there! And yes, there are conversion kits out there, they are not for the Sterlings per se but they do work good - we use the ones for 9" Ford axles, they only require minor chamfering on one end of the spacer and then they fit perfect. If you did the axles yourself then installing one such kit at least in the Sterling will be easy for you. The Danas are more of a pain cause of all the work you need to do to pull the axle shafts out, but on a full-float rear axle the diff can be out in 15 minutes with just basic hand tools. I would recommend doing the Sterling crush sleeve delete if you'll be putting good power down to the ground courtesy of the Cummins under the hood.Underdrive,
Yes they went away from the shim style probably because as you say it's cheaper. This age range truck (99-2002) has a Dana 50 in the front (I really wish it was a 60) and a 10.5 inch Ford Sterling rear diff. Both have crush sleeves. The 50 front has one that is about 2 and 1/4 inches long and yes they are not as good as the shim style setup. I think someone makes a conversion that removes the crush sleeve and replaces it with and heavy hardned sleeve and shims but I'm not sure. I didn't find out about that until I had both diffs rebuilt. As for the carrier brgs I bought a cheap Harbor Freight puller set and modified the largest bearing splitter to work. Not perfect but it got the job done pretty well.