Truck woes

Grizz finally convinced me that my truck needed to be looked at.. I've been limping along with a vibration in the driveline for awhile now... turns out I have been wearing out my guardian angel's luck allotment...

The rear most U-joint was worn out to the point of wobbling every time I shifted gears, as well as every revolution of the shaft...
Here's how the truck looked most of yesterday


and the culprit:


Grizz is the mechanic, I was relegated to gopher. He got the shaft dropped, but we couldn't get the bearings out, so he's going to take it to a garage today and use their press to get the three U-joints out. Might as well do them all since it it out of the truck.

For you southern folks, that's rust on the driveshaft, typical for a vehicle which lives in central NY.

Ned, I was going up a STEEP hill, and a guy was coming down, that STEEP hill, the other way, he was going fairly fast, the front UV joint on his truck dropped, the drive shaft dug into the road, the truck when Pole Vaulting down the road, at a high rate of speed.

We turned around and went to the crashed truck, the guy in the truck survived, but was messed up. He said he knew is was getting bad but.......

At least your truck was the rear joint, and now most trucks etc that have a drive shaft, have a thing that does not allow the front of the drive shaft to drop, but that old truck did not.

Better late than never, I guess...

yup,
the center carrier would have kept things from the pole vault stage, but it would have been 'interesting'.

Stuart Ablett said:

Ned, I was going up a STEEP hill, and a guy was coming down, that STEEP hill, the other way, he was going fairly fast, the front UV joint on his truck dropped, the drive shaft dug into the road, the truck when Pole Vaulting down the road, at a high rate of speed.

We turned around and went to the crashed truck, the guy in the truck survived, but was messed up. He said he knew is was getting bad but.......

At least your truck was the rear joint, and now most trucks etc that have a drive shaft, have a thing that does not allow the front of the drive shaft to drop, but that old truck did not.

Better late than never, I guess...

Click to expand...

Ned,

I had the drive shaft fall out of my ford when I was living in Texas. Not a fun time. Course, back in those days, one could still work on cars without a degree in computing. The manual said I needed an arbor press, but I just banged the new U-joint on with a hammer, if I remember correctly... I got a few more years out of the thing. Hope your fix goes as well...

Thanks,

Bill

Ned, If those are the original U-joints then they probably have a plastic internal lock ring. The way to get them apart is to heat the yoke with a torch until you see some yellow/black stuff squirt out a hole in the middle of the yoke ring. The bearing caps will pound out while the yoke rings are hot. If you attempt to press out the bearing caps without heating them you will stand a fair chance of damaging the yoke. (bending it out of parallelism).

Paul,
thanks! As it turns out they were the originals, and that procedure is precisely what the shop Grizz took the shaft to did for us. He says it works just fine now that it's all put back together. Hooray Grizz!