<light comes on> Ok, now I get it -- I confused direction-of-rotation with torsional loading. My sincerest apologies to anyone I've confused this evening. Rusty J Lawrence Johnson set me straight thusly: >Rusty, take a pencil and visualize it as your right side half shaft: with the >eraser at the transmission and the point at the wheel. Now mark an arrow on the >eraser in the direction that the transmission is trying to turn the shaft. Now on >the pointed end, mark an arrow in the direction the wheel is trying to resist >rotation. These two arrows should be pointing in opposite directions. If you were >to simply "Flip the axleshafts end-for-end" then the arrows would still be >pointing in the same directions. This means that the force from the transmission >and the resistive force from the wheel would still be wearing the CV joints on >the same ball races. However, if you took your pencil and visualized it as the >left half shaft, you would see that both the transmission force direction and the >wheel resistive direction are opposite to the arrows on the pencils. This means >that the CV joints would be wearing on the other side of the ball races. Almost >like having new joints. Should buy you another 50-70 thousand miles (well lubed >of course). >Larry |
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