How to Measure for a Custom Driveshaft - EASY

hey everyone welcome to two Car Pros my name is Ryan and today I'm going to show you exactly how to measure a drive shaft to have one custom made for your hot rod now in a stock application you can just buy a drive shaft for your car whatever year it is but our instance we have a 1955 Bel Air that's been LS swapped with a turbo 350 and we're using the stock rear end for right now so that's a super weird application it's not mass produced it's gonna have to be custom made so I'm going to show you exactly how to measure your drive shaft out get the correct yoke to get the correct U-joint and take it to your local drive shaft shop and have them make one for you I just had a regular steel one made you can make them out of all kinds of different fancy materials Steel's just fine for me we're not we're not making like a huge amount of power it's not a race car it's just a cruising car but you could certainly go that route if you really feel like you need to so this is a quick and easy way to get the driveshaft measurement correct that way you can get in your hot rod and drive it down the road now all driveshaft shops are going to be a little bit different but they just need the three things I talk about later in the video and they can make you one in about a week or two with all of that out of the way let's go ahead and jump in so before we get to measuring or anything like that we need to set the car up for the measurement so obviously I have a lift and that's probably not going to apply to you at home but that's okay all you have to do is pretend that this and this our jack stands on the floor and then pretend my screw Jack here is your regular floor jack so you want to lift the rear of the car up a bit with the regular Jack until it reaches its riding level and then we can measure it so here's the back of my transmission I have a plug on here be careful sometimes they leak a little bit of transmission fluid ours isn't so that's good and what I have here is my slip yoke and these are bespoke to the transmission you have we have a turbo 350 so this is a yoke built for our turbo 350. I'll leave a link Down Below in the description for this but it'll only work if you have a turbo 350 so find out what transmission you have however the rest is all the same so we're going to take our slip yoke and put it on the splines here and we're going to put it all the way forward just like that now a lot of people might think okay you're good you can measure no what you need to do now is pull it out about three quarters of an inch or so because if you pull it out too far you won't have enough spline engagement if you push it too far in as the axle moves and you know wraps and unwraps it'll push the Yoke too far into the transmission you can ruin the transmission or you won't have enough engagement and it can fall out so it really needs this three-quarters movement out of it bottoming out so before we start measuring two I want to mention that you want to keep the Yoke as horizontal as possible you want this surface here to be perfectly flat with the ground because if you have it uh tilted or at an angle or you know vertical it's going to change that measurement we don't want that to happen so I've marked in gold right here on the very middle of our Circle and that is where we need to hold the edge of our measuring tape just like that right there so we're gonna have a helper hold on to that for us while we go to the other side all right I have a helper holding it at the Yoke like I just showed you and what we're going to do is we're going to measure to right here right where the end of my pointer finger is so let's go ahead and get our measurement and it looks like it is 56 and one quarter so there you go Fifth and six and one quarter is our measurement okay just for fun I thought it'd be awesome to measure our old drive shaft it does not fit the Yoke's wrong anyway the Oaks for a power glide and we have a turbo 350 so I'm gonna measure it up just like we did earlier and it's at 54 so it is a full two and a quarter inches too short this driveshaft's really not going to work for us so this is our Park number from Summit Racing and it's the oak we saw earlier there's only three things you need to get your drive shaft made the first is the slip yoke which you can get off Summit Racing which I've already shown you how to do and we've already shown how to fit and measure that so you need that measurement ours is 56 and a quarter yours is most likely going to be different and you also need this U-joint this is what actually goes in the pinion side of the drive line so this is the pinion U-joint and these have a bunch of different numbers and stuff if you know the number you can probably just tell them that I'm not going to take any chances I'm just going to take this with me and say this is what goes on the pinion side so I have our drive shaft back from our Driveline manufacturer over in Oceanside California Oceanside Driveline they have been absolutely fantastic and hooked us up with this dynamite drive shaft I've already measured it when I got it back it is 56 and a quarter on the dot yours will be different you're going to have to measure it and that's what this video was about so when you get it back from your drive shaft manufacturer you know this will be taping this U-joint over here and that's to keep the cap on the joint itself and to make sure the needle bearings don't spill out of that so don't remove this tape until you are ready to install it into the pinion so before we install it we're going to lubricate the slip yoke with some grease and we can install it and everything should be good to go never put this on dry so now we can reinstall our drive shaft we're just going to carefully feed it up through here now normally you don't have this parking brake Arrangement you have to worry about so you can just kind of lift it up into its place so now we can align our slip yoke with the splines on the transmission it might take a little bit of jiggering to get it just right oh there we go and we're gonna go ahead and slide that in you can actually bottom it out like that and now we can go to the pinion side so I have a line the pinion so it's nice and horizontal along with our U-joint and what I'm going to do now is very carefully remove the tape holding onto the caps with my fingers and don't just yank this off willy-nilly be very deliberate and gentle hold on to those caps so they don't fly off that'd be a real Boomer now these caps a lot of things a lot of time people get this wrong this little indent here this little Tang that is just in front of my finger the U-joint caps need to fit in between those on both sides if it doesn't fit either a needle bearing is rolled over and the Cap's not sitting quite right or you're just plain Jane have the wrong U-joint but I think ours is right on the money so we can just hold the calves and slide it into its position making sure that the cap on both sides is behind that tang and that looks like a million freaking bucks thinking about our u-bolts back on sometimes it takes a little bit of rotating to get those in their home and I'm going to put a lock washer back on so I put that u-bolt on now I'm going to do for you the viewer I'm going to rotate over my drive shaft gingerly just so it opens up so I can get this u-bolt on in the same position and I haven't tightened the u-bolt on the other side as well just because I want to do it as evenly as I can you don't want to like Crush one side and then the other or you know do it unevenly so it's gonna be a Teensy bit difficult to film for you but long and short of it I'm going to just do it in an x pattern so just imagine an X you know and follow along and that you don't have to rotate for you should be able to get a wrench in there and mine is a half inch yours might be different so we're gonna do start on this give a couple turns go over here couple turns and then back over a couple turns back down a couple turns and we're just going to keep going in an x pattern until it's nice and snug down I don't have torque spec for you don't think you get a torque wrench in there anyway so just keep going around multiple times in the next pattern also if the drive shaft is moving on you you can put the transmission in park and it won't move on you anymore all right that was my fourth time around and it feels really really good so I think we're good to go on this guy so I'm just going to do a quick little walk around what our finished product looks like and check that out so that's about how much distance you should have on the transmission when it's in the air there's no weight on the rear end right now that is absolutely perfect I am so pleased with how this turned out custom transmission installed all it needs is transmission fluid and this thing's ready to go so that's how to get your custom drive shaft made for your hot rod it's really easy straightforward honestly the driveshaft Shop's doing most of the work they just need a couple of specifics and that's what I've shown you how to provide in this video if you found this video helpful at all please consider giving it a like or maybe even subscribing it really helps the channel out thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: 2CarPros

Views: 8,781

Keywords: Car, Repair, Tutorial, How, To, diy, 2carpros.com, Do, It, Yourself

Id: IBUGJGZcI-Y

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023