I would like to know if it would be safe to take a stock steel driveshaft, and use a lathe to remove, say, 1/16th of an inch from the radius of the thing. How thick is the metal of these? My neighbor is a heavy machinist and has all the equipement necessary to lathe a DS down a bit. Keep in mind this DS will never see 250 hp in it's life. TIA.

Why?

JamesC

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I would never take anything off the outside, only the inside, which you obviously couldn't do. I'm taking a strengths of materials class (because I major in mechanical engineering) and the highest stress point is at the most outer part of the shaft (furthest away from the center). If you're doing this for weight reduction, or to make the driveshaft lighter, you'd have to make the driveshaft worthless before you'd see any noticable difference. You'll be weakening the shaft far more than you'll be lightening it.

On the other hand, if you're doing it to balance it, you could get away with it as long as it's not way out of wack and you don't have to take off too much.

I am taking a class similar to Mike. He is right. the stress is increased as the radius is increased (larger moment). The middle part of the driveshaft is useless because the moment is so small. This is why they use hollow sway bars instead of solid ones now.

if you took .062 off the DS you wouldn't have anything left but something similar to tin foil. why would you want to do this? having made and/or changed the lenght of many drive shafts in a lathe the thing to do is buy a piece of drive shaft tubeing (yeah they make stuff for it) in the desired thickness and replace the tube you now have.

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ICON Motorsports

1st & 3rd
MM Black Diamond 538 F&AM

I suppose I just wanted to see if it would be a doable thing, just for the hell of it. Looking under many thirdgens, I see a rusted out DS that just looks poor. I figured, if you lathe it down to bare metal again, maybe take a wee bit more off, and then give it some sort of paint treatment, It'd be a cool looking thing, with a wee bit of weight lost. Just a thought.

Get an aluminum shaft and polish it. Lighter and brighter!

if you want it to look nice just use the lath to turn it and clean it with some emory cloth.

AFAIK, aluminum driveshafts only shave about 5 pounds from that of a steel shaft. It really wouldn't take a whole lot of metal removal to cut a couple pounds from a steel one, IMO. I'm gonna do some calculating when I get time, but just for reference, how thick is the steel of a stock DS?

Just clean it with a good rust remover, wipe it CLEAN with a cleaner and put a LIGHT coat of EPOXY paint on it. Never see rust again if you do it right.