Heavy Duty Drive Shaft U-Joints

[grindinggears]

Hello everyone!

This is my first post at Eurobricks, I hope you appreciate what I have built.

I made a Universal Joint with the center hole pin released half a year ago. The key to not let the friction exceed is to use these narrow connectors.

I have designed a whole drive shaft from 2 U-Joints and a flexible extension which can extent by one stud.

When building really big offroad vehicles (40+ studs width) you can use such a drive shaft to power every single tire, but you can also use it when transmitting force to a live axle.

I suggest not to use this with a gear reduction greater than 3:1 when using a single XL-motor per driveshaft. When I was trying this the drive shaft remained intact but some axles got permanently twisted and one 8 tooth gear got grinded to death.

You can find further images at my Brickshelf gallery and if you understand german you can read an article about this drive shaft on my web page.

I hope you feel inspired and would be very thankful for comments and critiques.

grindinggears

[DLuders]

I'm sure that your design will be very useful in HIGH TORQUE rock crawlers and Trial Trucks!

P.S. I like your "Heavy Freight Plane" on your German website!

[legoman777]

That will be very useful in some big mocs. thanks for the instructions.

Edited April 26, 2010 by legoman777

[backbone]

Check This:

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=427719

[Zerobricks]

Nothing new, misha made better ones like these (used in nicjasno's rear suspension):

And i made my own CV joints which can steer up to 40 degrees like this:

[Brickthus]

Hello everyone!

This is my first post at Eurobricks, I hope you appreciate what I have built.

...

I have designed a whole drive shaft from 2 U-Joints and a flexible extension which can extent by one stud.

http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/grinding...drive-shaft.jpg

...

grindinggears

I made some extendable joints for a Shay steam loco here.

That's an extension of 2M, albeit at a lower torque for a train, but it allows the Shay chassis to go round curves in either direction, powered by an onboard motor. I should switch to the shorter uni joints now that 3M ones are available.

For high torque applications I would be tempted to use a frame rotation around the rear axle where there is a right-angle mesh of gears, rather than a uni joint. Even better would be to put the motors as close to the wheels as possible. An XL motor can already twist a 3M axle!

Mark

[grindinggears]

@zblj

Oh yes I simply love the work ncjasno and micha have done. There multilink-suspensions are so advanced. I have rebuilt micha's u-joint and it is so elegant and simple yet strong. Too bad it has a very limited angle.

I remember having seen your cv joint on brickshelf some time ago. The only question I have when seeing this is how do the grey pins look like after some driving?

btw in my opinion you are one of the best technic builders I have seen. The functionality and the robustness of your models is just awesome (I can't believe you made a moc like the combine harvester in just a week)

[Zerobricks]

Grey pins didnt look damaged at all. I used the smooth pins for smoother operation, because friction pins are iregullar. And thanks for the compliments :)