bleda2002
Well-Known Member
If you don't have a locker that makes sense. With Rubicon already I did gears for 1k an axle, truss for 300 bucks. The tube thickness is .4 of an inch on gladiators so not much to gain spending the extra money on a UD44.I don't think I'd agree that snapping the axle in half is the most common failure at all. Ball joints with plastic liners are number 1 by a long way. Even if we are talking about actual breakage I've seen about as many aluminium knuckles break as axle housings. And neither of those are common. If abused those 2 would be the points that would break. Personally I wouldn't put steel knuckle money into building the stock front axle so there would be nothing gained strength wise adding the truss. You see people go full build on the stock 44 and it's still marginal for big tires if you're going to drive it hard. How much do trussed, geared, locker added, chromoly shafts, and steel knuckles builds cost? $4-5k where you could have bought a complete UD 44 with 1/2" wall tubes and no fad casting, HD ball joints, geared however you want, etc for the same money. Sell the complete factory axle for $1k easily if not $2k and you're money and strength ahead in my opinion.
I don't consider ball joints a failure as they don't need trail repair. They're a wear item and eventually they'll all need replacing hd or not so no need to fix it until it's worn imo.
Neither break is all that common, I agree with you, but I've seen the plug weld fail on slow obstacles, fast driving and rock crawling. The knuckle I've only seen following some high speed whoops
Sponsored
Last edited: