Revolution Gear Supply Chain Update

Well, after reading post after post and having side conversations with a few forum members over the past 24 hours regarding their experiences with RCV axles, I placed an order for the RCV axles and requested a refund from Revolution. Sadly, RCV is quoting 6-8 weeks for delivery on those, so I may have jumped from the frying pan into the campfire...

Hopefully those side conversations included that popping and clicking which happens to most of them is not covered under warranty. They have a very bad habit of twisting the stub shaft of inside the unit bearing which is due to bad heat treat or under torqued spindle nut, or combination of both. They have historically had what I consider a way too low torque spec on the nut, something around 120 ft lbs while stock is much higher. We torque them to the stock number and have not had any issues including breakage doing so.
 
Thanks, Mr. Blaine - yes, all of those issues were discovered and discussed. I'm glad to hear that torqueing to stock spec has been done without breakage, as that was my plan, but I hadn't seen any comments on whether or not that caused breakage.
 
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Hopefully those side conversations included that popping and clicking which happens to most of them is not covered under warranty. They have a very bad habit of twisting the stub shaft of inside the unit bearing which is due to bad heat treat or under torqued spindle nut, or combination of both. They have historically had what I consider a way too low torque spec on the nut, something around 120 ft lbs while stock is much higher. We torque them to the stock number and have not had any issues including breakage doing so.

I'm passing this along to my JK buddy who has RCV axles (without issues as far as I know). He's recently installed a new East Coast Gear Dana 44 front housing as well.
 
I'm passing this along to my JK buddy who has RCV axles (without issues as far as I know). He's recently installed a new East Coast Gear Dana 44 front housing as well.

NOTNSUV - after I did my research, I concluded that I should diligently grease the bells on a regular basis (every oil change), and if my axles go through standing water, I should re-grease as soon as possible. Keeping the bells full of grease helps keep contaminants (muddy water, for instance) out because there's not much room for them if the bells are packed with grease. I'm not convinced that that alone will prevent clicking and poppy eventually, but it certainly won't hurt.
 
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what makes RCV's different from every other CV axle that have been put in millions of FWD cars in the past 3 decades...the tech is pretty mature at this point. I would think being as big as they are and not even being on the main drive axle and only having to deal with bending in one axis instead of two would make them be able to last damn near forever.

For clarity, I'm not questioning that the problem exists, I'm questioning why they aren't better than they are.
 
What disappoints me more than the front shafts are the rears. I need good rears with the 5x5.5 option because I plan to do hubs eventually. I don’t really want carbon offroad or any other brand but that may be the only option I have.

As for RCVs, who knows. Many (I said many, not all or even most) buy RCVs because they read the marketing in a catalog and thought it sounds good. My guess would be the people who complain about them are a small percentage out of the total who actually bought them. The ones who bought some because they thought they were cool from the catalog likely don’t even realize theirs make noise if they do, so probably no complaints from them. You would certainly think for the price that they should be perfect by now, though. They have been around too long and cost too much to not be perfected by now.
 
I'm questioning why they aren't better than they are.
I know a guy who machines parts for several very popular locker companies. Not the little piddly shit either, some of the big parts that you can't fuck up on. He relates that his testing shows they are not nearly as good as they could be and he really doesn't understand why either.
 
what makes RCV's different from every other CV axle that have been put in millions of FWD cars in the past 3 decades...the tech is pretty mature at this point. I would think being as big as they are and not even being on the main drive axle and only having to deal with bending in one axis instead of two would make them be able to last damn near forever.

For clarity, I'm not questioning that the problem exists, I'm questioning why they aren't better than they are.

I think it would take a lot of investigation to truly answer your question. However, there are big differences between RCVs on a rock-crawling Jeep and the ones in my daily driver POS Subaru - lockers and 35" tires being two I can think of. As a former product development engineer in the vehicle universe, I can tell you that it's very difficult to predict how products are used by the end user, and this leads to a difficulty in fixing issues because you can fix what you can't break.

I'll give you one example that comes to mind. In my time in the snow machine world, we had a component on a rear suspension that was bomb-proof for 99.99% of our customers. We could not get it to fail in many thousands of miles of actual on-vehicle durability testing. For 9 months of the year, we had a crew of test riders who rode prototypes/test sleds in all types of conditions for 8-12 hours a day all over the world (you have to in order to get 9 months of testing in).

After investigating, we found out that it failed where cross-country racers were running snow machines on early-season bare river ice traveling cross-country all day preparing for the Iron Dog race (look it up - it's pretty intense). Once we figured out the situation that was causing failure, we could determine a test to replicate the failure and test improvements. Sometimes those tests are done by measuring loads in the real world and using test rigs to do the testing, but sometimes it's just easier to put the part on and and go ride until it fails in those same conditions, tweak it some more, and repeat until it's fixed. We chose the latter in this case because it was easier to send parts up to Alaska for the race teams to try than to send a team to Alaska to measure the loads (which is not as easy as it sounds) in order for us to test the revised parts on our rigs in the lab. In this case, after we solved the problem, we just sent race parts up to Alaska because it was an expensive fix to a problem that only these guys had.

My point - the company I worked for spent millions on design and testing, and we still encountered new issues every season. I doubt RCV has those resources, but I could be wrong.
 
What disappoints me more than the front shafts are the rears. I need good rears with the 5x5.5 option because I plan to do hubs eventually. I don’t really want carbon offroad or any other brand but that may be the only option I have.

As for RCVs, who knows. Many (I said many, not all or even most) buy RCVs because they read the marketing in a catalog and thought it sounds good. My guess would be the people who complain about them are a small percentage out of the total who actually bought them. The ones who bought some because they thought they were cool from the catalog likely don’t even realize theirs make noise if they do, so probably no complaints from them. You would certainly think for the price that they should be perfect by now, though. They have been around too long and cost too much to not be perfected by now.

I think this was mentioned earlier, but have you tried contacting Dutchman? I've used them a couple times over the years and when I last bought axles from them they were Made in USA. I'm not sure now though, or what their availability is. :unsure:

https://dutchmanaxles.com/
 
I think this was mentioned earlier, but have you tried contacting Dutchman? I've used them a couple times over the years and when I last bought axles from them they were Made in USA. I'm not sure now though, or what their availability is. :unsure:

[URL]https://dutchmanaxles.com/[/URL]

I have not. I've thought about them many times over the years but just always figured a custom order would be really expensive. I guess if they have had customers for the same axle before it may not be so bad. I'll try and check them out sometime and see what their options are.
 
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Looks like I'm late to the party, but I'm in the market for front axles now. I see many websites that show these USA-made axles in stock - I assume that's inaccurate info and an order would be turned into a backorder. Anyone have any leads on these, or are they still indefinitely unavailable? Should I just settle for the import Discovery Series?

Side question: Are the USA-made outer stub shafts 30-spline or 27-spline?
 
Hey Jerry, I’m try trying to understand this.

Do the unit bearings add rigidity to the splines in a manner that the carrier does not?

This is what mrblaine has to say about the issue:
Ever wonder why the TJ Rubi front 44 came with the same 27 spline stubs and unit bearings that the Dana 30 did? The reason that it came that way is the engineers understand that when the stub shaft is torqued to spec and is clamping the two halves of the unit bearing together, there is also something else going on. What happens is the flat face at the base of the stub shaft that butts into the back of the unit bearing is creating a lot of friction (just like bolts do) between those two faces. That friction greatly reduces the load on the splines and prevents them from breaking or twisting off.

Also why you almost never see a twisted off stub shaft but instead see broken yokes and u-joints.
 
I would add that it's the near-elimination of impact loading between the internal and external splines that allows the 27-spline outer shaft to perform like the 30-spline inners. Since the splines on the inner shafts aren't "locked in" to the carrier like the splines on the outer shafts are inside the unit bearings. The small amount of play that allows you to easily pull the axles out of the carrier creates impact loads on the splines in use. Think of the splines as little hammers against each other. When you lock the internal and external splines in place, that hammering goes away (for the most part). This allows a smaller shaft to be used effectively.
 
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