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Ibby doin' the Junkyard Jig...No, this isn't my yard, but I wouldn't mind if it was!

I busted a U-joint clearing a new trail. Cody was my swamper for the run, and he pulled the drive-shaft out for me (me finger don't work to good...ah huck).

Well...in typical jo-jo fashion, I cut the old joints out to replace them, but made a boo-boo along the way. I was a little preoccupied when I was putting the cups back in for painting. On one end of the shaft, I ended up bending the yoke ears and screwing up the surface the cup sits in.

Ok...so now I have a few hours to get something going here so Brian (wwwabbit ) can use the Jeep for the Sat. N.I.R.M Run, and I could have it for trail clearing on the following day.

Hmm...what to do?
Oh...hey, I have another CJ5 rear drive-shaft...oops, this one is a lot longer. OK, so I decide to try my hand at shortening a shaft.

I cut the shaft down to the size I wanted, and cut the splined end off, cleaned up the mating surface and stuck it back on the shaft.

I rotated the shaft to see if it was true. It wasn't totally straight so I tapped on the splined end with a chunk of led, and got it as close as I could. I was a little pressed for time so no dial indicator and pickiness here, just got it about right and tack welded it with a 6013 rod.

I finished welding it with TIG, and then my driveshaft installer (Cody) put in new U-joints and reinstalled the shaft. But not before another little problem: When I broke the shaft the weekend before, we didn't notice that the yoke on the Dana 300 was buggered too.

This brings up the reason why the U-joint failed in the first place. Dana 300s for this application used a strap style U-joint retaining method. The bolts that thread into the yoke had come loose, and allowed the cups on the u-joint to spit out (use a thread locking compound if you are stuck with these buggas).

A much better method is the use of U-bolts on the U-joint and yoke. These run through the yoke and are secured with a nuts on the otherside.

A quick look through my collection of Jeep parts by Ibby yielded a yoke with U-bolts off a Dana 20 transfer case. Nice......another Quick&Dirty® mod without even having to go more than 20ft. to source the parts needed.

After reassembling everything, and a test drive down the highway with no vibrations I was pretty happy.

The next day, Brian drove the Jeep without incident, and later that day I put it to task as you can see in the N.I.R.M Run report for March 1st 2003 (coming soon).

I also beat on it pretty good the following day while trail exploring. It would appear that I did a decent job on the shortening, and Cody did a good job on the install.

This is a little teaser for now, but I am going to build a beefed rear shaft using a mixture of Ford and AMC stuff (Spicer stuff really, just from different applications).

Written by jo-jo