I broke that shaft first trip out, we were running the gauntlet at Slick Rock and I had to bump it to get over the first set of rocks and it snapped.
Has anyone broken a Dana 35 1541H axle shaft?
- Thread starter 89grand
- Start date
Hell yea thanks for some real world input for the thread. Any reason why you went with a chromoly shaft over a carbon shaft? I’m assuming strength...since chromo shafts typically result in twice the strength as carbon shafts.
35’s, correct?
Trussed?
Aired down?
Who manufactured the shaft?
4.0 liter with an auto?
33s at 10 psi, no truss, i dont remember whose shaft it was but it was the cheapest i could find. Jeep was equiped with a 4.0, ax-15 and a 4.3:1 Atlas. Also had 4.56 gears.
Brian83
TJ Enthusiast
is this due to the way the shaft rides on the wheel bearing? Are there no Chromo shafts hard enough for that?
2006TJ1
TJ Enthusiast
From my understanding it's the hardness without a thorough heat treat that makes it worse.
It's the way the Dana 35's axle shaft bearings ride directly on the axle shaft since they don't have a built-in race like most bearings have. The Dana 35's axle shaft bearings use the shaft itself for the bearing race.
So the surface of the shaft has to be made harder so those bearings won't wear through the axle shaft's surface. A 1541H alloy shaft (and the factory shaft) has the desired surface hardness to prevent that, a 4340 or similar does not.
This shows what the Dana 35's axle shaft bearings can do to a 4340 shaft.
You're fairly spot on but that doesn't tell the whole story. There are too many factors in how a material responds to various load and the duration of the load. I was reading an axle article about this and they mentioned something along the lines of using 4140 in place of 4340 due to a higher resistance to impact loading. Being only marginally knowledgeable about what alloy to use for which application I found that highly interesting since like most, I would have opted for the higher strength alloy across the board and been wrong.
Sort of. It is more a skill and cost thing. 4340 can be made hard enough for a bearing to ride on it. That makes it fairly brittle unless the heat treater has the skill and knowledge to draw it back and create a ductile core. Most can't.
I just dug through all the reciepts i have for my Jeep and found which shafts they are, they were Revolution gear and axle 1541H shafts. I remembered them being chromos but i guess i remembered wrong.
OP
That's exactly what I have. I thought I read that the axle shaft snapped at the end of the wheeling season, but then you said they broke the first time out.
It was the end of the season and my first time with those shafts. I shredded my spider gears the week before and threw those on while i replaced those.
OP
I'm not trying to question what you're saying, just want to make sure I'm following you. So when you shredded the spider gears, was that with stock shafts, and if so were the shafts fine? You said you threw the Revolution shafts in while you replaced the spider gears. What were you using in place of the spider gears you were replacing?
The stock shafts were fine, i had the Revolutions laying aroud as spares because i knew snapping a shaft would be a possibility. As far as the spider gears i replaced them with a set i got off summit. Luckily i was able to drive off the trail on the stock shafts and drive it until i could do my 8.8 swap.
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Thanks for pointing this out, because where I work I get 4xxx stuff hardened to all kinds of different hardnesses. We get gear teeth hardened, we run 4xxx materials against all kinds of different materials like bearings for different applications.
1541 vs 4xxx is pretty similar so the cost part certainly makes sense. We don't mass produce most items, so when I think of making something, we're often buying a forging and using manual lathes and mills to turn it down. Stuff is often forged and heat treated before we get it, though sometimes we machine over and then send out for heat treat and finished grinding, which I would think would be optimal for these shafts. Optimal but makes sense that a 200+% increase in price for say 10% strength increase probably doesn't sell well.
My confusion is that I kinda assumed someone found out a "cheap" way to do this especially with all the CNC stuff and induction hardening methods though this is probably a grind to size application.
The issue is the long shaft. It has a lot of length to handle torsional loads and that is what makes the ductile core so important.
I am thinking of changing the transmitted differential number from 4.10 ( DANA 30 and DANA 35 ) to 4.88 (parts of G2). I replace the four axles with the axles of G2, 27 plines, 4340 (I only have them in Europe). I have new ARB lock 27 splines of rear and front differential. Because of that, I can't go to 30 splines axles. I hope the combination is good because I have no choice
4340 should only be used with the front axle and not the rear where a Dana 35 is concerned. 1541H has the surface treating required to protect it from the outer bearings that ride directly on the shaft without benefit of a bearing race.