Busy fitting my rear panel and it dawned on me that although the Sierra diff is mounted centrally in the Indy tunnel, the actual output faces (splined type driveshafts) of the diff are offset to one side. Effectively making the driveshafts different lengths on each side (hope this makes sense).

Question is are the driveshafts actually different? I didn't notice any difference when I stripped and rebuilt them and everything went together OK when assemblrd onto the car.


Just want make sure I haven't totally missed a trick here

Cheers
Nick

Hello Nick

I am pretty sure the CV joints left for right are identical,infact i remember only seeeing one part number.

The left and right shafts are just different lengths.

pic to show what I'm talking about!
Rescued attachment P1050116.JPG

Hi Bob,

That's what I was wondering - although I'm thinking that I wouldn't have been able to fit the assembled driveshafts into the car the wrong way around.

I'm off to check and see if there's any ident marks or par numbers on the shafts themselves

no part numbers I can see, but there is a blob of green paint on the one fitted to the "shorter" side.

Guess I'll have to wait and see

The N/S shaft will have a left hand thread on the hub nut, O/S is right hand thread .

The diff is not symetrical, the near side driveshaft is about 40mm shorter than the other one. It would not be economical for ford to produce different parts left and right, even in the numbers they make.

driveshafts are different either side .

youll need to get them correct or one side will fall out , or will go solid .

Well both driveshafts are in a turing freely when I had a short test dirve, so I guess all must be OK - cheers guys!

I don't know about the push in shafts like yours, but with the lobro shafts you can get away with using the same length both sides on a 7. There isn't enough suspension movement to lock them up or pull them out.

Both shafts are the same length on mine, I ordered them that way!

Push in drive shafts are deffo different lengths on each side. Should be pretty impossible to get them the wrong way around.

And one is l/h thread, the other r/h thread.

[Edited on 24/7/06 by andyace]

quote:

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Originally posted by NS Dev

Both shafts are the same length on mine, I ordered them that way!

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ahhhh, that's where the wisdom of buying the shafts from GB Engineering really pays off!!

They are long spline shafts, the splined sections are 3 inches long at each end, so the cv's plunge but the splines slide in the CV's too.

They were designed for grassers to get huge wheel travel without pulling the cv's out, but on the car they just make the job easy! You just run circlips on the outside grooves, radius the ends of the shaft and it just hits the inside of the cups which stop it moving too far.