Drive shaft failure survey

[BioBa]

Just interested how many had a drive shaft failure and how old the drive shaft was at the time.
I had one and the drive shafts was around 70 hours old.

[tonto1]

Where's "Moochofun", he break shafts more than he breaks wind?

[lanan]

30 Hours..!

[SportsLibre]

Let's see, since I've owned it
6 years of about 20-30 hill/sprint events each with an average of over 4 standing starts,
We'll call it 900 standing starts and 25 hours of hard accell decell running.
In the eight years before me, probably 3 or 4 years of serious racing which is ?? hours plus several years of track days with the odd race?

Any by the way as far as I can tell theses are still the original "cut and shut" tube welded hybrid fiesta shafts.

[BioBa]

Wow! That must be a record.

[moochofun]

Did someone mention my name?

I must admit to breaking quite a few of the 'wet spaghetti' shafts in the year or so I have owned my Prosport 1300. I must admit at the start to being quite heavy on the tyre warming until I broke my first shaft.

After that I tended just to launch it off the line and forgot all about tyre warming altogether - avg time cost was 0.2-0.3sec to the 64ft beam at Doune . Then I got a bit braver and started to 'warm' them when it was wet. This led to another shaft break...

Back to just launching off the line... This lasted so long until I had another shaft break. Admittedly these were either the shafts that were on the car (who knows of history!) and a couple of second hand ones that I got along the way.

I am now on new shafts from Big R and haven't had an issue in the last couple of rounds - and that has been with taking bravery pills on the final run and given the tyres a quick spin up on the line - both launches saved a scrappy run and ended up with PBs on both occasions

I do have a spare set that are new. I was planning to get some hivvy dooty ones this winter although I have a nagging feeling that its better to spend £150 every so often than suffer a £1-2k gearbox/diff rebuild...

Anybody got any opinions on hivvy dooty shafts?

As a comparison, my busa engined westie had the standard ford diff, shafts and CV pots and I used to kick the ass out of all sorts of tyres (none 10" slicks though) and never had any issue with shafts, diffs or gearboxes... That was on a K8 motor though - are they any stronger? Should I not be worried about gearbox damage on the powertec motors?

[moochofun]

Did someone mention my name?

I must admit to breaking quite a few of the 'wet spaghetti' shafts in the year or so I have owned my Prosport 1300. I must admit at the start to being quite heavy on the tyre warming until I broke my first shaft.

After that I tended just to launch it off the line and forgot all about tyre warming altogether - avg time cost was 0.2-0.3sec to the 64ft beam at Doune . Then I got a bit braver and started to 'warm' them when it was wet. This led to another shaft break...

Back to just launching off the line... This lasted so long until I had another shaft break. Admittedly these were either the shafts that were on the car (who knows of history!) and a couple of second hand ones that I got along the way.

I am now on new shafts from Big R and haven't had an issue in the last couple of rounds - and that has been with taking bravery pills on the final run and given the tyres a quick spin up on the line - both launches saved a scrappy run and ended up with PBs on both occasions

I do have a spare set of shafts that are new. I was planning to get some hivvy dooty ones this winter although I have a nagging feeling that its better to spend £150 (and 10mins to replace) every so often than suffer a £1-2k gearbox/diff rebuild...

Anybody got any opinions on hivvy dooty shafts?

As a comparison, my busa engined westie had the standard ford diff, shafts and CV pots and I used to kick the ass out of all sorts of tyres (none 10" slicks though) and never had any issue with shafts, diffs or gearboxes... That was on a K8 motor though - are they any stronger? Should I/shoud I not be worried about gearbox damage on the powertec motors?

[LCM]

A reply so nice, he posted it twice...................................

Anyway, used to get through chains and drive shafts on Betty like I was single handedly supporting the whole BECR transmission industry.

Switched to Brand shafts and never had a problem since! (They're used on all the Forces).

To save you searching through previous posts:

Brand Mechanical Engineering Co
25 Wainwright St
Birmingham
B6 5TH

0121 327 6622
[e-mail]

[doctordave]

will back lcm on that one,i now run bb in jersey have just got back from alderney and their
hill in made from the stuff that you see on the roads 100mts from traffic lights,kills the tyres but what grip,loads of warm ups and no problems yet but she is a bit special lol.