Dented front drive shaft (1 Viewer)

[Straylight]

Just removed the trans/engine/tcase. When I removed the front drive shaft there was a LARGE crease/dent in the body of the unit. My question is: can this be repaired? Should it be repaired? Should I just bite the bullet and buy a new or used one?

The crease is between the universal joints on the larger of the two pieces, when I drove the cruiser there didn't seem to be an undue amount of vibration. (didn't notice anything).

With this large of a dent do I need to assume that there are seals that were damaged and need to be replaced?

I can take a pic and post it if it would help

Straylight.

 

[IDave]

I would like to know the answer to your question, since I have a couple of dents in mine, too. If you could post a pic to give us an idea of the relative damage....

 

[moralien]

Yes they can be repaired. It's called re tubeing. Any good drive shaft shop should be able to help you out.

 

[76FJ55]

You shold definately get it fixed. it is seriously weakened by large dent. Remember it will only fail when you really need it- when the front drive is under load. If you have the front hubs unlocked and you're in 2 you are not turning the front shaft and that could be why you haven't noticed a vibration during normal driving.

 

[wayne_fj40]

Yes they can be repaired.  It's called re tubeing. Any good drive shaft shop should be able to help you out.

You also can go down to the steel warehouse and buy a new tube cut off you're ends and weld them onthe new tube,and just have it re balanced if it's on the front though I probally wouldn't have it rebalanced since you only use it when it's in 4 wheel drive.Just my theory :G

 

[woody]

I've had some severely dented driveshafts in the past....it only gets real bad when they get that barber-pole twist in them...lol

While retubing sounds easy, you'll need to search a bit for a shop that carries metric-type tubing. Normal SAE tubing needs the shaft machined down for the diameters to match up.

One trick I've heard of is using the long rear shafts from a toyota pickup as a doner for the tubing, since that's a metric size.

Course, you might get lucky and find a local driveline shop than can retube a Toyota shaft...a few calls should do it. (I would NOT mention that the tube might be metric size....let them quote a fixed price for the tube work and have them call you if anything odd comes up....they might have tricks that my local clowns don't know....)

 

[Straylight]

Here is a pic of the front propeller shaft with the crease/dent.

 

[Straylight]

One more time.

 

[SpaceGhost]

Have it retubed. Woody called it, the sae tubing requires work most shops won't do. YES it can be done, but there isn't much material on the yoke to turn down for a fit. Most shops stop short of those mods for liability reasons.

Getting a long fj60 shaft or mini shaft will net you plenty of tube for a couple of repairs. Been there, done that numerous times!