GV carnage. very ugly pics.

[oregon96psd]

Just looks like the shaft broke and the the two ends spun on each other breaking the case. They work like two wedges when broken like that, somethings gotta give and the aluminum case was it. Its really not a huge explosive failure (or at least it doesnt look like it) just a broken shaft and case. My 2 cents worth...

 

[Devon Harley]

wow he has a large smile on his face for have to broke somthing that cost as much as a good used truck. maybe that shaft threw shardes in his head. Good luck would like to know what actually happened. My dad let a friend borrow his boat an he threw it into rev. trying to go back for a skier that flew right away. It snapped the shaft an went threw the out drive.

 

[Hydro-idi]

Jeeze that is quite the mechanical failure right there! Although I would really like a GV for my rig, the expense and extra moving parts that have the potential to fail has steered me away for now. Sure hope that fella gets his truck patched up because that is really too bad.

 

[Darrin Tosh]

Wow, Never seen that before,.

Here is one in WA for sale:

http://spokane.craigslist.org/pts/3325739879.html

 

[Csm Davis]

I had one do almost exactly the same thing on a 84 6.9 2 wheel drive that was not ever hammered on, on highway only and no overweight loads. It was installed at the gear vendors factory and they didn't want to send another one to there dealer to replace it but finally did after my lawyer sent them a warning, it was 6 months old and had like 4-5 thousand miles on it. Truck was sold soon after and I heard it did it again a few months later, I will never buy another one.

 

[jaluhn83]

The shaft failed first and that's what wrecked everything else.

Hard to tell from the pics but it looks somewhat like a fatigue failure. Hard to say for sure though, and hard to say what initiated it without better pictures.

Whoops, just realized this was a 2 year old thread.

 

[Diesile]

Two years old but relevant. Mine broke a main shaft with no previous abuse. Came home using frt. wheel drive.
Factory wanted to sell me a new 'improved' version @ list. Never again......

 

[jaluhn83]

Interesting. Picture? If you can send me the shaft parts I can do some failure analysis work on it and see if we can figure out the source.

 

[Agnem]

Sadly, it is probably a metallurgy problem. Companies get stock from steel suppliers, who in turn make it into a machined part. In the nuclear and aerospace industries, such companies get paid to do their own metallurgical tests, and have x-ray vision or whatever to look into the steel to see if their is an air bubble or something. I've seen cracked crankshafts, where you can see clear as day once the thing has split open, that there was a void in there. Stuff happens. It doesn't mean the company that built it isn't a good company or it isn't a good product. It just means they were unlucky. You have to remember there are thousands of these things running around without issue, and that we as a society always like to sensationalize the bad things.

 

[Black dawg]

I agree, there are many of these things out there, being used/abused, and only a handfull of failures reported on the net.

Those are some scary pictures. I have a GV in a vehicle that gets driven all over, and offroad, and would really like to know the cause of these failures.

 

[PwrSmoke]

Did I miss a post where Towcat described what he meant by "torque reversion?" To me it means something like an intended 5-4 downshift was 5-2 or 5-1. On a downslope! Even then, I would be amazed that the GV would fail in the way it did without some kind of an internal flaw..Anyway, we can put that one in the "epic fail" category.

As to the Jolly Joker grinning in the pic, even if it wasn't pilot error, and was just one of those "*****-matter-occurs" type deals, I wouldn't be so happy over having been at the wheel when that happened to a truck that didn't belong to me.

 

[ToughOldFord]

I just got a report yesterday that a guy at that plant I work at found that if he red-lines the Cat in their Freight-shaker and suddenly dumps the clutch he can make the front end bounce up and down like it has hydraulics.....