Man, what a day. . . I finally got the time to do the homebrew h&t and things went wrong the entire way through. Man. First things first:
I started by taking the driveshaft off and measured the 1 1/2" of spline I was going to keep. I then tapped it off so I knew where to start cutting when I put the jeep into drive.
Well, this is where things went downhill incredibly fast. The blade wandered and finally caught and didn't cut smoothly. The cut-off wheel just jumped and cut very very wrong. I can't get a good enough picture of what it looked like: very uneven.
Well, I was able to fix it, kind of. I put a grinding wheel on my trusty dewalt and started the jeep and put it back in gear and just layed the grinding wheel on the shaft until it stopped jumping. It's quite a bit better than it was, but I'm not happy with it yet. I'm going to see how bad it vibrates and make a descision based on that: going on a lathe or saving for a REAL SYE from tom woods. Either way, I ended up with 1 3/8" of spline left, not bad, but not as much as I wanted. I then started on the yoke.
I ended up cutting 2 1/16th" off, also not cut at a perfect 90*. I should have just called it a day after the shaft went wrong.
Well after I got it cut I started on drilling the end of the shaft. Well, since I didn't have a good pattern from cutting the output shaft, I had to measure for about 10 min before I felt comfortable about center punching it. Ends up I measured wrong by just over 1/16th", which I had to kill the jeep and drill sideways until I centered the bit. It's still about 1/64th" off, but I'll live with that. I then proceeded to burn up both my 3/16th and my 21/64th drill bits. a 45 min. trip into town later I came home with 2 new ti-ni coated bits that cut through the shaft like butter, pretty impressed with Lowe's brand Kobalt bits. Then, man is murphy's law being applied time after time tonight, I started to tap the hole. I didn't break the tap, I stopped well before I was overly worried about it, but the tap won't go in more than 5/8".
I wasn't about to force anything, so I just stopped at 5/8". I'm not happy with it, but I'd be ALOT less happy trying to get a broken tap out of the end of the shaft. I slapped the yoke on and coated the hell out of the bolt in red loctite and torqued it to 50ft/lbs. (That's nothing more than a guestimate, but seemed plenty tight without worrying about overtorqueing it)
THEN! Get ready for this. . . I measure for the driveshaft, and I'm short by 1 1/2" on the very conservative side. Total buzzkill. I have 4 driveshafts of differenct lengths and not one of them worked. Hadn't planned on that. so monday I'll be getting one extended and balanced to get under the Jeep. I've got a list of things to do for tomorrow, but I won't be able to post until Sun. Brock vs. Randy "The Natural" is tomorrow, so I'll be busy. Until then. . .