U-Joint expirement

[3rd Petal]

As any of you who wheel a Dana 30 or 44 on bigger than 35’s probably know, the 1310 series steering u-joint in your axle has it limitations. If your running a quality Spicer 760x joint, the first thing that usually happens is the cap spins in the yoke, walks the half circle c-clip off, and your cap starts coming out until it hits a ball joint stud and self destructs.
That situation can be remedied by either clearancing your shafts to run full circle clips, or by welding your caps to the axle shaft. I’ve been doing that for a few years, and it will get you a long ways, but I was still pretty good at breaking them even with the caps welded in.
Once it’s impossible for the cap to come off, the next weak point is the needle rollers in the joint, under extreme load they quit rolling and start to fail, and once all your needle rollers are turned to dust the joint self destructs pretty quick after that.
Nowadays there are plenty of aftermarket solutions, CTM, OX, Nitro Gear, Longfield, and RCV to name a few, all of which are far out of my price range
Most of the aftermarket “super” joints run a bronze bushing instead of needle rollers, so that’s the direction I went.
I was able to find some oilite bushings with the right ID and OD to replace the needle rollers in a Spicer 760x



Gutted all the rollers out of the caps



I had an old joint I had previously robbed all the seals from, and I noticed you could get 0.1” more bronze in the cap without the seals, so I’m trying one sealed joint and one without seals



Installed in some junkyard shafts with caps welded in for good measure



Next week is Bronco Safari, so we will see how they hold up. Normally I get 2 days out of a stock 760x with welded caps, hopefully with bronze bushing it does a little better

[Teal-J]

Interesting experiment. Awaiting the results, especially longevity reports of road driving

[turbobrick]

What are you running to only get 3 days out of a quality 760? When I was running a built D30 I used the Longfields with great success, enough to easily be cheaper than the amount of 760s you’re going through. I like your idea, but I’m guessing it won’t be any stronger. The caps on the joints you mentioned are a bushing to allow the cross itself to be larger. All this might do is help prevent the distortion of the needle bearings, but I’d wonder about the suitability of this material in that application.

[3rd Petal]

I’m running a fullsize bronco on 37’s. I’ve got 5 more days of trails here in Moab, we will see what happens, so far so good though

[3rd Petal]

Held together for Moab, I’ll keep beating on them to see if I can break them. But so far they are doing pretty good

[WILLD420]

Wonder how this worked out?

Didn't CTM or one of those other companies come out with a special Copper based grease for their joints that worked better than regular?

[3rd Petal]

They worked, I twisted off a stock shaft at the splines and never had a u-joint issue. I’d like to try them in some chromoly shafts, just haven’t gotten around to it. For grease I just ran a high graphite grease, I don’t know anything about copper based grease, I’ll look into it though

[Brizzman]

Thanks for posting this, and thanks to WILLD420 for bumping it back up where I would see it. I remember reading it before, but forgot about it. It sounds like this is a vast improvement over just a stock Spicer joint.

Can you post your source, part numbers and specs for the bushings you replaced the needle bearings with?

[3rd Petal]

So the ones I used I got from work, don't remember the part number, but these should be the same or similar

https://www.bronzebushings.com/aa-92...6-od-x-3-4-oal

You need to shorten them to fit in the cap properly, I forget the length but it is easy to figure out with a little measuring. I haven't noticed a difference yet with the sealed vs non sealed ones I made, I'm guessing if you stay out the the mud like me the seals don't really matter much, but time will tell I guess

[3rd Petal]

It was 0.46 with seals, or 0.56 without