Drive Shaft Concern

[Rick B.]

Re: Drive Shaft Concern

Thank you Jim, I will have a look !

Rick

[Paul J.]

Re: Drive Shaft Concern

Rick,

For future reference, when you heat a small area of metal, you "realign" the molceules just out from the heated area, causing the weakness that you were told about. Any weakness is minimal and can be further limited by cooling the area quickly. Your drive shaft is welded on the ends, and similar weaknesses are already there, all the way around each end. Those areas have'nt broken and I doubt that a "filler bead" would cause enough weakness for the shaft to fail. If you watch the series of shows shown on Spike TV, you would have seen them shorten automotive driveshafts by cutting and rewelding. They have done this several times, and I believe that the pros do it also. Re-tubing gives you uniform strength all the way down the drive shaft, until you come to the ends. The welds at those ends will have weakened areas adjacent to them. I have never seen a drive shaft fail adjacent to those welds. It may have happened, but I have never seen it.

Paul

[Jim L.]

Re: Drive Shaft Concern

The welds at those ends will have weakened areas adjacent to them. I have never seen a drive shaft fail adjacent to those welds. It may have happened, but I have never seen it.

You raise a good point about the welds. They definitely can fail. Look closely at the end of the half-shaft tube in this photo:



The root cause of this failure can be summarized:

rev engine, pop clutch, go sideways, repeat

Jim

[John H.]

Re: Drive Shaft Concern

Then again, the welds can hold and the tubes can fail; formula for this pair was a 540 Merlin and slicks .

[Dick W.]

Re: Drive Shaft Concern

Here is a link to a company that manufactures driveshafts for the Sprint Cup cars. Am sure there is no balance problem with their shafts, with the engines turning 9,500, if there was, it would fly out of the car. Clickee heree