Corvette Torque Tube Disaster
Transcript
Happy Friday everybody and welcome back to Lyles Friday podcast here at C&S Corvettes in Sarasota Florida I've talked to you in the past a couple of times about torque tube issues on c5 and c6 and getting into c7 Corvettes now as they get a little older we provide the bearings and the couplers and I've talked to you about that in the past to rebuild your torque to GM does not rebuild torque tubes they want to sell you a brand new one for several thousand dollars normally yours is perfectly rebuildable and you can save a lot of money doing it that way however you have to have somebody do the job who is conscientious and knows what they're doing because if not you end up like an unfortunate customer I had in the shop this week let me show you what I'm talking about here in front of me is the drive shaft from a c5 Corvette it resides inside this tube right here it rides on two bearings at the rear in here and one bearing at the front over time those bearings can get rusty and you start having this shaft oscillate inside of this tube which causes damage and noise worse than that though is somebody who replaces your bearings and your couplers but then doesn't correctly reassemble this shaft into that housing let me show you what happens when that is not done properly I move up here to the front of the shaft when we point it out to so this is the shaft that goes into the back of the engine the flywheel the clutch whatever this bearing right here presses into the collar at the front of that tube whoever did this job only press the bearing in that far because of that this entire assembly was able to walk backward and this came out of its collar so now this whole thing is spinning like this for example if you look at this right here this coupler has been chewed down completely to the metal look at that compared to your shooter from over here look at how much material has been lost between the coupler the way it should be and that coupler as you can imagine this made a whole lot of noise but the customer thought that it was exhaust noise it was not exhaust noise obviously now the front of this wear that belt bearing was supposed to be is right here we lean it towards you so you can see what I'm talking about this lip right here is where that bearings supposed to live they only got it into about there and then it backed out if you look in here you can see the scoring on the inside of this tube where that coupler was trying to cut its way out of this torque tube you can also see all that sparkly stuff going down there that is all the rubber and the metal from that coupler as it got ground down to nothing furthermore at the back I want you to look at this coupler now this is where this hooks up to your transmission or your torque converter look at the distortion that was forced onto this coupler because it was writing so far back and it was oscillating up front as compared to the normal coupler this assembly was completely destroyed I actually had to get a completely different torque tube to rebuild for this customer because the way that one was cut up inside kind of like you would cut a piece of PVC and plumbing the structure that was weakened enough I was afraid that was gonna snap in half one day bad job overall thankfully we got to it before this damaged his transmission or his torque converter because if those things get damaged you're looking at several thousand dollars worth of repairs as it was this repair cost about sixteen seventeen hundred dollars including the core which isn't bad but if you're not expecting it that can really suck so I guess my message to you is if you're thinking of tackling this job by yourself and you are just a hobbyist mechanic I would recommend either letting somebody else do it who knows what they're doing or having a friend who has done this before assist you best case scenario is you find a well-known well-regarded longtime and business mechanic shops somewhere in your area that can do this job for you and they absorb the liability for something like this you do not want to own this okay if you have questions about this if you see something in these assemblies that you have questions about you want to learn more about how this works and how a bad torque tube can affect your car let me know 800-866-5064 or you can get me at Lyle@Corvettepartscenter.com you know as always don't forget to Like and subscribe to these videos and I'll keep bringing you more information like this hopefully not quite as catastrophic is this I hope y'all have a good weekend - drive safe