I'm putting my engine in my ch***is, and I hesitate with the different angles. Street Rodder of march 2002 showed some different solutions. I chose one but I've some difficulties to respect these angles. I put my engine 3° down and my rear end 3° up. In that way, Street Rodder tell to put the driveshaft at level or 2° down. Are these driveshaft angles inevitable or it doesn't matter what angle is ? In my case, with 3° down for the engine, 3° up for the rear end and my engine at the right height to place the fan shroud, my driveshaft is about 2 or 3° up towards the rear end. Do you think I can leave it at this position ? Thanks Thierry
As long as you have the engine/trans centerline and the pinion shaft centerline parallel you have the important part correct. The driveshaft will be at an angle and that is ok as long as the angle between the driveshaft and either end is not too severe.........say more than 7 degress, for instance. But that would only happen if you had either a very, very short driveshaft and/or a significant difference in height between the trans and rear end. Neither is likely in a normal hot rod. From your description it sounds like you are good with what you have. Ray
IMO an "imperfect" 3° down and 3° up will be fine, ideally, put the pinion angle to 2.5° up, providing a slight mis-alignment to keep the bearings in the u-joint cups from wearing in one spot and to provide a little room for the rear axle to "wrap up" under hard acceleration. The wrap up thing wont necessarily apply with a 4 link etc. BTW, how do you type "the ° symbol"?
The joints will be working at a 6º angle. Not good. Angle the rear DOWN until the included angles of the engine to shaft and the shaft to rear match. It will work a lot better. Retired mech. engr.
As the others said 3 up 3 down. I have used this for years and never had a problem. Tom ( Tired old Man)
? º¡¶§ ? On a Mac  it's just alt + 0 =º  = shift + alt + k =  Play with them all, it's fun!
That is like saying the only comp*** direction is 287º. It may be proper to go from Houston to Dallas but so what. There are reasons the parallel idea works. It is just not the best. You are only trying to get the working angle of the joints the same. It does not make any difference if they are are opposite or the same. You are trying to remove the cyclic variation in speed that is a fuction of the working angle. If the angles are the same, the velocities cancel. This is a cl***ic case that if a missunderstood theory is repeated often enough by people who have no insight to the math, it become dogma.
Sorry sir, but a racing engineer here, and you are incorrect. The original post of 3 down on the trans tailshaft, and 3 up on the pinion is correct, 100%. The opposing angles cancel each other out this way, and this is the correct way to set up driveshaft angles in his particular situation. I ***ure you I am correct.
Andy, I didn't have time to properly respond to this but this can be qualified as misinformation when applied to anything that moves such as the conditions we have here. Parallel angles between the engine/trans and the pinion are critical with a non-fixed axle ***embly. Something like a Corvette or Jaguar rear axle where the pinion does not move in relation to the engine trans, intersecting angles can work. And here in lies the problem with intersecting angles in a drive line. They don't stay the same in use. Say the engine is down in back by 3 degrees and the pinion is down in front 3 degrees and the driveshaft is level. Both front and rear angles are 3 degrees and cancel out, fine. Compress the rear suspension one inch, and for the sake of argument the car has a parallel four bar so no pinion change with travel, the drive shaft angle is now 1 degree up in the rear. This put the front angle at 4 degrees and the rear at 2 degrees of change. Those two degrees of change are going to shake pretty darned good. With parallel angles this situation does not happen as the angles remain equal over the entire suspension range.
Any angle, side to side, up or down, will work good and last a long time as long as the shoulders of the U-joint don't make contact at suspension travel extremes.
You guys might try this. Pg 8-52, Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers. Baumister & Marks. Seventh edition. It has been the standard reference for 100 years. Look under Couplings if you find a later edition. I have had this one since 1970. You might learn the truth.
i found this to be a very easy explaination of drive line angles...my fiat also is looking at a driveshaft running up hill to the olds housing.... the page is a PDF file so it takes a few seconds to open.... http://www.iedls.com/asp/admin/getFile.asp?RID=10&TID=28&FN=PDF
So you want to ignore everything posted including what comes directly from Dana/****er when it comes to setting up drivelines? We have gone through this before Andy, I'm not going to spend hours on end digging through reference material to try and prove your point of view. If I'm wrong, fine but you are going to have to prove it. I already studied this stuff, put it into practical application. I have even used intersecting angles to try and solve a vibration issue on my personal ride only to find out it doesn't work well for the purposes of connecting an engine and trans to a suspended beam axle. Dana/****er, Inland Empire, Denny's Drive Shaft and just about every drive line shop in the free world agrees that parallel angles is the best for this situation. It's not dogma, it's fact.
It appears that the Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers was revised on Sept 1, 2010. Apparently you have not recieved the revision yet. Just kidding ... I think the revision was actually released on Aug 30, 2010.
Yeah, that's just what I need to do is spend $50 on a book just to argue about driveline angles. Stupid.
I am en***led to my opinion ... and you are also en***led to my opinion . Jeeze, I'm gonna make a good wife some day . Is it legal to beat a dead dog? I mean ... it's already dead right?
Seeing that it's dead i would say yes, it is legal. But if you hit it too hard the driveshaft angle might change and then there will be another driveshaft angle thread. So i guess let dead dogs lie would be safer.
Depends entirely on what type of suspension you have. Parallel leaf rears the pinion angle changes very little in most cases. Parallel four bars change none Ladder bars change at the arc length of the bars. Triangulated have a curve dependent on the geometry Way too many variables to give a simple answer
You could use a rear end with a offset of centre pinion. The same parallel angle theory would apply º  ha! did it.
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