<< If you're talking about a 110/Defender, it is an excellent idea to weld
the half/sideshafts to the
drive flanges. Particularly on the Salisbury diffs, the splines tend to eat
each other out on the
flange end causing backlash and eventually spline failure. >>
Spline wear on Salisburys is a fairly big issue on Series rigs because
the level of heat treat was a lot lower than the shaft itself. Rover
corrected this on the later coil sprung rigs by raising the RC (Rockwell C)
level of the flanges so its a lot less of a problem. This isn't to say that
you can't wear out a later drive flange because Rover is notorious for loose
splines even on the 24 spline stuff.
You can solve this spline wear issue on the Series Sals by case hardening
the flanges to RC 60ish. We sell hardened drive flanges for this application
and install them on the remanufactured Salisburys that we sell.
A quick comment on welding flanges to axles. Personally I wouldn't do it
unless I had an axle/flange combo that had excessive wear and I was just
trying to bodge back together as a temporary fix. The problem with welding
heat treated parts together is that you effect the heat treatment on the
existing parts and now you have a weld that is totally different hardness.
This creates serious stress risers and this is where the stress cracks will
eventually develop and hence this is the point where the axle will eventually
fail. If you do weld these types of parts together, it is a good idea if you
are interested in long term durability, to have the parts stress relieved. As
an example cryogentic freezing is a very good way to stress relieve welded
parts.
Not having a separate flange, which is prone to spline wear is a good
idea, which is why we chose to use a one piece design for our upgraded Series
axles i.e. no spline means no wear. The difference on these is that the
flange is machined as part of the manufacturing process and not welded on
later.
Bill
GBR
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