My brother in law purchased one of the new driveshaft kits available for me at christmas time and I figured they are easy enough so I cut it down to size and installed it in my sedan after the first test run this is what happened when getting on it in scond gear.......motor is a mild sbc hooked to a ford toploader with a quickchange. After this I just ended up shortening a stock 32 shaft. I think a thicker wall tubing would be in order.
Where was the kit from...? I don't want to get one of those... Call them up and tell them what happened and see what they say......
who defined mild...hahaha only kidding man. Charlie told me about this sat. morning...Car looks and sounds awesome
I believe he bought it from Spadaro's, it was cut to length then checked on the lathe to make sure it was straight before welding then rechecked after welding to make sure the heat didn't change it, didn't move a bit, car had less then 1/2 mile on it. I reused the rear coupler end of it after I shortened a stock 32 hollow driveshaft and converted it to the 6 spline.
I would like to hear Dick weigh in on this one. I don't see how the shaft could have flexed enough in 1/2 mile to fail. You would think that to have enough flexing to generate enough heat to fail in 1/2 mile that the alignment would have had to be off by a country mile.
I'm curiuos too ,now you have posted those details. I have a few thousand miles on mine probably by now I did mine myself without a lathe I just installed it in the car and made sure it didnt feel like it was binding by rotating the lower spur shaft by hand with the trans in neutral. Has you torque tube been shortend and checked to be true as well ?
Yes the torquetube has been shortened and is as straight as an arrow, it was spun then mounted in every different bolt hole with an indicator at the trans end, I know if the outer torquetube is not straight it will at some point eat the splines of the pinion or lower shaft of a quickchange whatever one you may be using.
good to know , sort of sorry for your hard luck,,, shortened mine at home,,, used the stock solid shaft also ( shortened to match of course)
.....looks a little on the small size to be tangling with any OHV V8 to me. If it was still a flatty then OK....SBC??? Hmmm.....sedan, SBC, tall tires.....getting on it in second gear. BOOM! I wouldn't be suprised if Spadaro is gonna cry foul on this one.
just for fun stick a dial indicator on the rearend housing input shaft, and check the runout of the housing flange.
The Hagen Brothers of So Cal did a Tech Article a while back and they have a fail safe method, (for shortening drive shafts) one used by many locals in So Cal. Dick Spadaro told them they were over fabricating (in a letter he wrote them). Now look who's failing with an aftermarket idea. Look at a '36 Ford driveshaft, the walls are much thicker. http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=226015 too bad the pictures are gone, the welding was amazing.
looks like more than a test run sounds like when i told my dad i blew my spider gears out by just pulling out my buddies drive way nice and slow. well i was telling the truth about one thing. I sure was pulling out of my buddies drive way!
If that is the same 2" OD x 0.065" wall tube as the other thread, I gotta say I think that's way too thin for drive shaft material. We run 2" OD shafts in our dirt modifieds, but they're 2" x 0.120" wall DOM. Built right in a lathe with a DTI on the joint to ensure zero runout. Never balanced, and I've never had a problem with one of them. When we were first starting out, we ran a 3" OD x 0.065" (stock shaft matl) tube, and it died a horrible death. It was shortened and balanced by a drive shaft shop. The thing vibrated bad, and liked to shook my teeth out at the end of the straights. It lasted about eight races before it twisted off on a heavy/tacky track (meaning as soon as it saw a track that could stick all the torque the motor had to give, it puked). The next to last 2" shaft we built had 43 races on it when we bumped it to backup duty. 16 gage tubing is just too thin for cars with much torque or traction to speak of.
It looks like 1 3/4 OD and the ID is .062 ish The replacement piece I used is a stock 32 shaft and that is 1 3/4 OD and the ID is about .109, I'm not at the shop right know so i used a crummy caliper to measure. I have run it pretty hard with the stock 32 shaft and no problems......yet.
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