Broken Driveshaft

[84rzv500r]

Wow! That is some serious twisting!

502 inch big block CHEBBY and wide sticky tires... and in the defense of the 40 year old half shaft it survived some serious abuse... scores of 1/8 mile dragstrip runs and many weekends of Autocross in X prepared and a few exhibition runs on the long track at WGI

 

[84rzv500r]

I could see it being the heat treatment process.

me too looks like it was a little to hard...

 

[zipper]

I cant find the other pictures of shaft failures however I think I saved some of the broken shafts in a box so that i could make a tool to get the couplers apart from the flanges easier... I'll look next time I'm out to the Junk pile..

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Is that from corrosion inside the shaft at a weld point? It looks too linear.

 

[84rzv500r]

the grains in the metal look like it is a cast or forged blank before machining... doesn't look like a billet shaft structure... its not a weldment...

 

[zipper]

I expected to see more twist before shear/failure as in these stock photos of softer metals. But forging makes a stronger metal as it aligns the crystaline structure/grains within. So that harder metal would shear in a more linear way depending on that alignment of atoms/grains.



But not to this extent. I know, aluminum.