Well I decided to have some fun tonight and do something that I have been trying to do for some time now. I was always thinking about modifying the axel so that you could run a longer shock and don't get u-joint bind. I did make reference to this in other threads but always said that I did not want to comment because I have not done the mod yet. Well tonight I did, on one side only and only as a proof of concept. This has apparently been done by one of the Australians already (bugeye59) but it has never been documented and no comment was made on how long a shock he was using. Randman and I were both thinking of this for a while and you can see the comments in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17574&start=0Anyways tonight I will try to document this for you. My methods are skill billy but good enough as far as I am concerned. It gives a good indication of what you can run.
Basically what I did was take two pieces of aluminum and mount them in place of the shock. On one piece I marked off several 1/4" increments. The black line you see in the pictures is the stock 15 1/4" oddy shock length. Then a photo was taken of the u-joint clearance. This process was repeated at each stage. At a certain point I removed the axel and ground clearance on the axel with a die grinder. You will note that I did not trim anything off of the cap area as there is not much meat there. Only the main part was ground down. The caps were only cleaned of casting marks, that's it.
Yes I can hear the argument already -- "you ground off some so now the shaft balance will be off".
In my opinion NO. An oddy gearbox has a 10/1 reduction. That means at 8000 rpm the shaft will be spinning 800 rpm. It is also a very short solid shaft. That means it will not flex like a regular auto shaft. So balance will not be an issue as we are taking off very little on a solid short shaft.
See pics and comments. (give me a few minutes to post all the pics before you comment)