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3 minute(s) of a 731 minute read
4-25-2019
After commuting home in the Z I really wasn't happy with the amount of vibration I was experiencing due to the driveshaft change. I had no other pressing issues aside from packing so I elected to try something new that I had read online.
The one piece steel driveshaft I used was clearly balanced from the manufacturer, but apparently that doesn't do much good when installing it into another rotating system. That either means that the driveshaft is still out of balance, or my driveline is significantly out of balance...I'm really not sure.
Stock picture of driveshaft I purchased:
And this is the ugly monster I replaced (mostly, this has a different rear flange for the auto models I believe):
Anyway, I had a vibration. My theory was I could balance the driveshaft myself. My theory/plan was as follows:
1) Check runout of driveshaft, hope and pray that the max runout in the middle was at the same orientation as the tail. It was.
2) Add a small amount of mass through the use of hose clamps with the worm gear oriented to the OPPOSITE side of the driveshaft where the most runout is evident. If it gets better or worse, this would be seen as a positive result as it would tell me I have the ability to adjust/control/change the vibration. The addition of 5 hose clamps made it WAY worse. Success!
3) If the current orientation made it worse, rotate them 180* around the driveshaft and observe. Results were much improved.
4) Fine tune location by rotating the orientation of all 5 clamps 30* clockwise, and then 30* counterclockwise. Counterclockwise made small improvement, which told me that the orientation is probably nearly optimal.
5) Adjust mass by removing hose clamps. Once again, a change for better or worse would be seen as a success. I removed hose clamps one at a time until the change from 3-2 got worse.
Ultimately I settled on 3; and got the car down off the lift and took it for a test drive. Trying to assess vibration on the lift versus the road is a crapshoot. Generally NVH will be much greater without road contact (I'm assuming because the mass of the car isn't engaging the suspension to help mute some of the vibrations) so I wasn't sure what to expect. Test drive up to 80+mph resulted in NVH on a scale of 0-10.....maybe a 1. I am thrilled and looking forward to two hours in the car through southern Wisconsin tonight. 94 sucks, but taking the backroads to Chicago is one of my favorite local road trips.