Two questions. One, where did you find a driverside drop front Dana 70? Next, are your pinion angles set up to meet the driveshaft at 0*. Meaning have you taken all the angle out of the diff side? And if memory serves again, I believe someone make an offset ujoint that could run with that kind of angle installed in a cv setup.

RubberDuck

 

If i remember right i think that they are from a trencher of some sorts.

 

Cool trencher!

RubberDuck

 

Yeah, the front axle started out as a trencher axle- 35 spline inners and outers, open knuckle. It was centered in its own application, and very narrow. I added 19 inches to the passenger side. I do have my diffs rotated up a bit, but I dont have my diff yokes pointed directly at the T-case yokes. I found out years ago that if you do that, the needles in the u-joint dont move enough and only a few of them take all of the load all the time and then get pounded in a short while. The offset joints are from Tom Woods. they wont work in a cv application, they are a neat idea for a single, but I am not willing to pay $60 each for them.

 

supposedly they vibrate like hell too, i dont know if id want them in a rear shaft

 

I don't care who you are, an open knuckle Dana 70 front axle is bad ***. As for the ujoints not working in a cv set up. As long as they are the same dimention (sp) as their normal counter parts with two caps kicked out........crap, I just rembered the guts ride on those caps that would be kicked out. Never mind, I'm stupid. I hate it when yall confuse me with the facts. Anyway cooooool front axle. Is it disk brake?

RubberDuck

 

Rubber duck- sorry I didnt answer sooner, its been a busy week with trying to get a free 87 beater Bronco ready to go wheeling next weekend. Yes, the 70's do have disk brakes. They initially didnt have any, and the steering arms were cut off of the knuckles, I did some reasearch and found that GM and dodge used the same parts from the knuckle out-mostly!! My knuckles were dodge type, because the arms mounted higher on the knuckle- found another pair on e-bay (for the way my steering and suspension is set up I dont need or want an arm mounted on the top of the knuckle because that puts all of the steering forces on only the top of the knuckle instead of spreading it over the whole thing)Also got caliper mounts from e-bay but sourced my calipers from a junkyard off of a 2wd gm tonner dually. When I started looking for rotors, I priced GM dana 60 rotors- seemed to run around $90 everywhere I called, then I found some on e-bay(of course) used but plenty thick for $70 buy it now price for 4 of them. After another $70 shipping, I found they wouldnt clear the knuckle- turns out that dodge and GM use the same brake parts with the exception of the rotors- new dodge rotors only $25 each DAMNIT!!! (still have the GM ones if anybody needs them!!) After building these axles and all of the money and time spent on this and that, maybe the magazines are right when they recommend that people seriously look into just buying a custom made axle assembly!!

 

I did some looking at the two military trucks I have in the field and found that the u-joints are fairly big without being obscenely huge, so I furthured the quest at my favorite salvage yard and found that medium duty trucks seem to be mostly equipped with the same joints, so they should be fairly easy and common to find. Grabbed a couple of shafts to take home for more research. The seem to have a pretty good amount of angular travel ( havent actually measured it yet) The two slipyokes I found are very short though, so I might have to try that damn square tube driveshaft thing. Just have to figure out a way to connect to the t-case end now- maybe have custom drive flanges made or make them myself. Also looked at some agricultural PTO shafts- the design of the yokes makes for a huge amount of angular travel- over 90 degrees, but you obviously cant spin the shaft at those angles as a different sort of binding occurs. None of the ag joints I looked at seemed beefy enough to me, so in the near future I will look more into finding some larger more suitable agricultural type setups, -- anybody tried ag joints or know someone that has and how did they do??