Question about replacing my front driveshaft, 1980 4wd pickup... I'd been having a thunking noise from my front end when hubs are locked (not as bad) and when in 4wd (worse). i crawled under and sure enough there is a bunch of slop in the double cardan side of the fr. driveshaft. i pulled the shaft out, making sure to mark the flanges and slip joint so i don't get it out of phase when reinstalling. On the bench, i think its the CV, not one of the u-joints as i had thought. After reading about the expense and headache of replacing one of these, i dug through the snow to get to a pile of parts and found the cv half of a driveshaft from a '79 i had picked up for parts. so... my question is, when reinstalling this, what do i have to look out for to keep it balanced/not out of phase? can i just match the flanges to look like the original complete shaft? i seem to remember reading somewhere that it takes an even number of u-joints to have phasing issues, thus a cv driveshaft can't be out of phase? sorry for my long-winded question.
