rear driveshaft fell off

scouse have sent you a pm got to be worth a carton,as for horror stories about drive shafts I think it was last year on the Auckland motorway a truck drive shaft came apart the uni-joint went through a car window and decapitated the driver and when I was working on an open cut mine in WA got a call on the radio my truck went bang and is leaking oil I was thinking just a blown hose (I wish)the rear uni had let go smashed everything between the chassis rails including hydraulic pumps,hoses,wiring looms and hydraulic valves just glad I didn't have to pay for that repair

We recently replaced a D2 front propshaft, trans cooler lines and had the bellhousing welded because the double cardan joint had failed. Keep a close eye on them, they have no grease nipples from factory.

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Originally Posted by Omaroo

This has long been a pet "horror thought" of mine.... front of the rear driveshaft decouples.... digs into the road...

bbrrrrrr............

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....and you do a fantastic pole-vault straight over the side barricade into the river :) :D , police arrive :nazilock: and book you for illegally swimming in a declared area :D ;)

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Originally Posted by Omaroo

This has long been a pet "horror thought" of mine.... front of the rear driveshaft decouples.... digs into the road... breaks off at the rear and comes up through the floor taking out a rear passenger in a single up-thrust....


bbrrrrrr............

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Its unlikely that it would ever happen but it wouldnt be hard to put a chain from chassis rail to chassis rail under the shaft so if it broke it would land on the chain rather than the ground and dig in. Matt

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Originally Posted by stevo

I wouldn't do it for long but it may get you to a safer spot like a rest area or a town would keep the speed down to 60kmh as well there are alot of "highways" where it is not safe to park on the side of the road due to the heavy traffic had to travel 1.5k's once on a flat trye it was at night on a hilly winding road with trucks going past every couple of minutes and no room to pull right of the road.

Redback may take you up on that offer will wait a couple of days before making up my mind which way to go so I take it a dI shaft fits along with the diff yoke.

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My front dropped off the other day while father in law driving. was 2 km from home so I thought 'i'll engage centre diff to make it home'....only to find out that my linkage was out of adjustment and centre diff wouldn't engage (so couldn't move). I had been sus on it engaging for a while, thats one way to find out...

Excuse me in advance for being a bit technically retarded when it comes to the nomenclature, but: I was talking to some guys here in Melb who specialise in Land Rover about lifting my Disco. I was told by this bloke in no uncertain terms that lifting more than 25mm is dangerous because of the fact that a uni-type joint at the front of the tailshaft (Just behind the centre diff) can fail due to too much stress being put on it. (He showed me the result of one that someone had prepared earlier - nasty) I can only assume that there is a fix avaliable for it if I wanted to lift my truck say 50-70mm? Could lifting the suspension without proper mods be the cause of the aforementioned failures?

Matt

Unis have to have some angle on them, but 25mm wont do much to them. As the angle increases the wear in them also goes up. I've seen some charts and it looked pretty exponential to me. I run 4" lift on the standard unis, and a greasable DC joint.

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Originally Posted by Plod

Excuse me in advance for being a bit technically retarded when it comes to the nomenclature, but: I was talking to some guys here in Melb who specialise in Land Rover about lifting my Disco. I was told by this bloke in no uncertain terms that lifting more than 25mm is dangerous because of the fact that a uni-type joint at the front of the tailshaft (Just behind the centre diff) can fail due to too much stress being put on it. (He showed me the result of one that someone had prepared earlier - nasty) I can only assume that there is a fix avaliable for it if I wanted to lift my truck say 50-70mm? Could lifting the suspension without proper mods be the cause of the aforementioned failures?

Matt

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Probably not with mine. The bolt holes had cracked through and then it just broke into peices. The actual uni part looked in good nick still. Two of the mounting bolts were stripped and one was bent so the bolts were failing for a while and probably caused the damage to the mounting flange.

To cure the Uni Joint problem... I know of 2 solutions running from not cheap to the "would sir mind swiping his house deed, signing off one arm and leg, and handing over the parental rights to your first offspring" kind of not cheap.

The first is to have your Prop shaft rebuilt using CV type joints as found in most cheap front wheel drive mobile crumple zones and then having the input and output shafts of your diff and tcase modded to suit... not cheap... but it has 2 upshots, 1. rotational stresses are pretty much even through most of the range of movement untill you hit the end of movement and then its snappo time. 2. you do away with the "angular velocity change" problem with UJ's.

The seriously uncheap version of the solution is to have a jig made for your axle housing that supports your houseing at the flange mounts. have the axle cut at the mounts, rotated to relieve driveline angle stresses, rewelded checked for true then rebuild the rest of your front end into it. Ive seen this done on an old toyota with leafs with a spring over with enough lift to warrent aircraft warning lights on the roll bars. The guy who owned it loved it.


of course the really cheap option is to learn how to replace your own UJ's for my old series theyre only $30 for a pair of top of the line ones and they take me maybe an hour to change.

Dave.

"In a Landrover the other car is your crumple zone."

I've got 3" lift and my front has just started vibrating at 110 so i'll be removing both front and rear drive shafts and replacing the uni's and getting them balanced before refitting. Doing the radius arms at the same time so hopefully this will stop all vibs etc.. lucky its not and everyday driver so i can afford to have it off the road for a week or 2