Replacing Tom Woods u-joints is starting to get old

HornedToad

HornedToad

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Both mine and my dad’s jeeps have TW rear driveshafts with gold seal u-joints. Mine because spicers were unavailable when I ordered it and my dad’s because that one was ordered direct from advance adapters with an sye and there was no spicer option.
Mine had one go out driving to Utah and I had to replace it on the way a few months ago. Now I am rebuilding my dad’s just days before our rubicon trip because the vibes suddenly got bad. I’ve take it apart and almost half of the cups (greased and not missing any needle bearings) will wiggle back and forth while moving them with my fingers.
I don’t know why they keep selling this garbage (probably because they make more money) and surely they know they are prone to failure. Now I know everyone has nothing but good things to say about their customer service and there’s a good chance they would have “taken care” of my u-joint problems if I asked but really it would be best if they just didn’t fail so soon.
Anyway I promise this is the last time I complain about gold seal u-joints. For all the future driveshaft buyers out there—do yourself a favor and make absolute sure it is built with spicer joints.
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JKP said:
TW will use Spicer, you just have to specify them when you order. No idea who makes the TW joints.
Click to expand...

Like I mentioned both times we ordered we were somewhat constrained to order with the gold seal. I am aware they will use spicer if you check the box and they happen to have some, hence the warning.
 
LincolnJr said:
You mean like improper drive line angles that are prematurely wearing out the U joints? Or something else?
Click to expand...

Angles are fine. Both jeeps were vibe free and in both cases within a single long drive on the freeway the vibes came on strong. And in both cases the culprit was a sub 10k mile gold seal u-joint.
I just finished a freeway test drive with a freshly rebuilt driveshaft and it was butter smooth.
 
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"The Gold Seal universal joint exceed manufacturer load, life and strength requirements. The grease fitting is also placed in the end cap, which not only increases the joint body’s strength, but makes greasing and service easier. Most importantly though, if the u-joint does break they will also warranty damage to the drive shaft. As an added benefit, Tom sends all of his driveshafts’ u-joints pre-greased."
 
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I've been tagged so I will reply. I usually try to not react to problems defensively for two reasons. One is because it never looks good. The other is because if defensiveness is the default reaction I/we will never identify our faults or weaknesses. If those things cannot be identified they can never be corrected. That being said, there are some misconceptions I would like to address. Sorry if it seems like I'm reacting too defensively.

  • We use our own brand joints for various reasons.
    • A long long time ago, when we were just a small company, Spicer would not sell to us due to politics involving the company my dad (Tom) used to work for, which was at the time a large Spicer distributor. They went out of their way to prevent us from accessing their parts. At the time, my dad was a strong advocate of using only Spicer parts. Plan A of using only spicer parts fails, you gotta come up with a plan B. When we did finally get authorized to buy direct from Spicer we didn't jump ship on the other suppliers we had established, partly out of principal and partly out of pragmatism. We do currently purchase a lot from Spicer though.
    • Turning an obstacle into an opportunity, my dad took the opportunity to have joints made with a bit of a design change/improvement. Instead of putting the grease fitting in the body of the joint where the hole creates a weak point, we put the grease fitting in the end of the cap. Also, when grease fittings are in the body of the joint they are difficult to access. The harder it is to grease a joint the less likely someone is to do it, hence the grease fitting in the cap.
    • Availability. During the supply chain shortages and ridiculous backorders of recent years we have moved more of our parts away from Spicer and Neapco. It is not uncommon for orders to be 3-4 months backordered. These are orders that are placed at the beginning of the year as monthly releases, its not like we didn't plan and just drop an unexpected order on Spicer. Normally, we stock a ton of Spicer joints, we try to keep a couple months' worth on the shelf (see the attached photos). Whenever we have been out of Spicer joints it was because Spicer couldn't keep their obligations to fulfill orders. When we don't have parts for months at a time, we can't sell drive shafts for months at a time. That's a quick way to piss off our customers and to go out of business. This applies to more all parts, not just joints.
  • Addressing the idea that we are using "cheap" joints to cut costs.
    • All joints are cheap, by "cheap" I mean inexpensive relative to the rest of the parts of the shaft. All 3 universal joints account for about 7.5% of our total expense when looking at our cost to build and ship a shaft. If we were looking to use cheap parts to cut costs we would look at parts that cost more, like the cv weld yoke which costs more than all the joints combined. We could easily sneak this in as nobody ever asks what brand cv weld yoke we use. Do that with all the other parts and we're talking some serious savings. But we don't do that, we use spicer and Neapco parts for almost all the parts in our shafts. We use these two brands, spicer and neapco, interchangeably. They are both premier quality parts and we use them both so that we aren't totally dependent on just one supplier. If we used bargain bin joints we might be able to cut $10 (approximately $3 per joint) total from the cost to build a shaft. Not a significant amount.
    • We don't charge extra for Spicer joints. Whenever a customer specifies that they want non-greaseable joints we default to spicer. This is primarily because Spicer is the brand that people usually request when requesting non-greaseable joints. That used to be the only brand non-greaseable joints we carried. However, over the last couple of years there have been times where Spicer didn't ship us our orders for several months at a time so we started carrying Neapco non-greaseable as a backup. The reason we don't charge extra for Spicer joints is because the price difference is negligible and because we want people to choose what they want based on what they think is best for them, not on price. Frankly, I don't care which joints a person wants us to use which is why I go out of my way not to lead the customer's decision. I don't however remember a time where we were out of non-greaseable joints altogether or didn't have spicer greaseable joints on the shelf. Your understanding that the goldseal was your only option was, I believe, a misunderstanding.
  • Addressing the statement that the goldseal joint is "prone to failure". I believe this statement to anecdotal and extrapolative. The fact that it can happen does not mean it happens often. We use about 25,000 goldseal 1310 series joints a year. Naturally, statistically, some of those are going to be bad or fail prematurely but it is not a common thing. If it was, we'd change course real quick.
  • I don't actually see visible wear on the trunnions of the joints. I know you said you can feel some play and I know you said that replacing them fixed the issue but I still don't see where or how the joints are worn.

Bottom line(s) to all of this:

We aren't making a decision to use the joints we use based on cost. In fact, there is a line of Spicer greaseable joints that we could use that actually cost us less than the goldseal joints cost.

For those of you who prefer the spicer non-greaseable joints we are happy to accommodate that preference at no additional cost. It is a standard selectable option on our website and a question we always (unless we maybe forget) ask over the phone

Sometimes things do fail or wear out or have problems though. @HornedToad, you seem to have had some bad experiences with our joints and for that I sincerely apologize.

spicer joints all.jpg
 
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I'm going to use this opportunity to talk about the Neapco vs Spicer thing too.

Most people don't realize that Neapco stands for New England Auto Products Corporation. In a recent email to our Neapco rep explaining to him why we primarily use Spicer non greaseable joints I told him. "People always request Spicer and are weary and distrusting of us if we try to use anything else. This is because people are uninformed and just believe whatever their buddy told them but the consensus amongst our customer demographic is that Spicer is infallible and USA made and anything other than Spicer is cheap Chinese junk. Again, this is because people are misinformed. But be that as it may, I’d rather just sell them what they want than to spend a lot of time trying to change their mind." "People have a hell of a time pronouncing Neapco. They always say Neepco or Nepco and I think to a lot of people it sounds foreign, Americans distrust things that sound foreign." But Neapco is indeed an American company with much of it's manufacturing done here in America. Inversely, people seem to think that Dana/Spicer is a 100% American company with everything made here in the United States. That is not true, they are global company with many things made internationally. Take a look at their own location map https://www.dana.com/contact/locations/. I'm not saying that their overseas stuff is junk, just that they aren't as red, white, and blue as people seem to think. Ultimately, I believe, that the ethnicity or the geographic location of the people making the parts does not guarantee the quality, or lack thereof, of the parts being made. Lots of good stuff made overseas and lots of crap made in the US and vice versa.

Furthermore, Neapco focuses more on aftermarket components. There are many parts that are we, and Adams and others, use that Spicer just doesn't make because they don't care about what the guys with the modified Jeeps need when they are making parts. Dana/Spicer is a very big company and focus most of their attention to the OEM side of things. In 2022 Dana/Spicer did $10.2 Billion, with a B, in revenue. They have historically shown very little interest in developing products for aftermarket. Neapco on the other hand seems to recognize this gap in the market and does a lot to develop and manufacture products with aftermarket in mind.

Last week we were introduced to our new Dana sales rep. This was after 6 months of having no rep. It is hard to maintain a working relationship with and clear communication with a company if we don't even have a point of contact.

Lastly, we've had problems with parts from both Spicer and Neapco. The most recent time we had a crate full of defective parts from Spicer we brought the defect to their attention and it took them close to a year to resolve it. They kept telling me that they were working on finding the cause of the defect to which I'd reply "I don't care why there's a defect, only that there is one. Let us send these parts back for credit, then you can take all the time you want in figuring out the exact cause.". On the other hand, last time there was a defect with some Neapco parts, within a couple days I was on a conference call with about 5 guys at neapco, production, engineering, and quality control, addressing the problem and finding a solution. They seem to take quality control much more seriously and address our concerns much more seriously when we suspect there is an issue with a part.

Because of the reasons listed above we buy more parts from Neapco than we do from Dana. Both are good companies, both make very good quality parts, but there are reasons why many of us aftermarket drive shaft manufacturers are gravitating more towards Neapco that have nothing to do with price.
 
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@Shawn at Tom Wood's

Thank you for the thorough reply. I honestly didn't expect one when I started this thread in the heat of my frustration but your professional response supports the stellar reputation your company has on this forum.
I apologize for the unnecessary and unfounded suggestions I made regarding the use of gold seal joints to simply make more money. That wasn't called for and it makes perfect sense that you would need at least two suppliers of u-joints to run your business.
 
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HornedToad said:
@Shawn at Tom Wood's

Thank you for the thorough reply. I honestly didn't expect one when I started this thread in the heat of my frustration but your professional response supports the stellar reputation your company has on this forum.
I apologize for the unnecessary and unfounded suggestions I made regarding the use of gold seal joints to simply make more money. That wasn't called for and it makes perfect sense that you would need at least two suppliers of u-joints to run your business.
Click to expand...

No apology needed. You had an problem with our shaft(s), which was frustrating, and your frustration is valid. It makes perfect sense to assume that a company would choose certain things from a cost cutting perspective, as that is what most companies do. I don't expect you or others to know what things cost or why we might choose one part over another until we make those reasons known by being as transparent as possible. I should acknowledge that we of course don't ignore cost altogether. If there's a part that we believe to be of equal quality but has a significantly lower price we will give preference to that part. This is sometimes the final deciding factor between making either Spicer or Neapco the default source for a certain part. I'd say that the hierarchy of decision making in this regard is: 1 quality, 2 availability and reliability of order fulfillment, 3 price.

I'm happy you didn't perceive my reply as argumentative and that you appreciated the response. Thank you for responding as well. No hard feelings on my end and again, I apologize that you had a bad experience with our products in the first place.
 
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HornedToad said:
Thank you for the thorough reply. I honestly didn't expect one when I started this thread in the heat of my frustration but your professional response supports the stellar reputation your company has on this forum.
I apologize for the unnecessary and unfounded suggestions I made regarding the use of gold seal joints to simply make more money. That wasn't called for and it makes perfect sense that you would need at least two suppliers of u-joints to run your business.
Click to expand...
Knowing that countless people will read the forum over the years, and maybe stop right there, its not too late to edit the original post.
 
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This may be the beer talking but there’s a lot of love going on in this thread right now…

homer simpson hug GIF
This just might push me over the edge on buying that SYE and driveshaft I’ve been considering
 
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