alright im looking to get some better crawling out of my 1994 sammi which has a 1.6 8v in it. I have 31" tires and dont really look forward to putting $500 worth of transfer case gears in at the moment. Would changing the axle gears make a noticable difference?

I run the 4.89:1 t-case gears and my dad runs the 5:12 sidekick thirds in his samurai.  The cool thing i like about the t-case is while in 2h the only thing i noticed was a little more power through all of my gears and my dads with the axle reduction its always low geared and is a little over 4000 rpms at 50-55 mph and mine does 65 and im a little under 4000 rpms. But both do great off road.

so he could go with a gear more suitable for his driving. there are so many factory gear options and they can be had very cheap. most of the gears like the 4.30 and 4.62 are worthless to the kick guys so they can be bought for next to nothing.

imho, it depends on what you are wanting to do with your Sami as to which gearing will work for you.

I had 5.12 r&p gears and stock t-case. It worked fine on the street and had me pulling 4200rpm at 65mph, BUT the crawl ratio was 42:1 and it sucked off road.
I switched out to 4.30 r&p gears and 6.4 TT t-case. Now I am running 4100rpm at 65 mph and my crawl ratio is 100:1. This is the best of both worlds for me. The 4.30 r&p gears have my speedo corrected so it is spot again too.

Here are a couple of the online calculators that I have found usefull :
http://www.lepayne.com/gears.html
http://www.grimmjeeper.com/gears.html

i would go with the t-case cuz i got a 6.5 kit and it's a awesome low but it's a 1.1 in high so it's stock until you put in low range and i'm runnin 38's and 4.10's on toy axles.... it leaves you with the option to go up in tire size and not worry about gear

All Samurai T-case have reduction in high range, I think the 6.5:1 is in the
15-17% range even in high range, which is how you are pulling those 38's
along on the highway

Wild

Only thing that is being left out here is that the less gear you run in the rear and the more torque you pass to it (transfer case gearing), the more likely you are to break axles and such. I currently run the 5.12's and a stock transfer case. The issue I run into is that I would like to lower my highway RPM while getting a better crawl ratio, but am worried about breaking axles. I guess the 205 hp in front of the transfer case doesn't help my worries!