Wondering if this would be any better then locktight. the reason I ask is I don't have the want to spend the cash on a full spline main shaft and I figured it is better then welding heat treat steel shafts.

 

Waste of time. If it has come loose once, nothing will stop it from doing it again until the worn shaft and gear are replaced. You would have better luck actually welding it....but that is a temporary fix as well. The weld will eventually fail. JB weld doesn't stand a chance. The nut was never meant to hold all of the thrust load of the gear...which it is doing if the shaft to gear fit is worn out.

 

Jb weld is not the correct type of adhesive for the application. It WILL fail. If I was in a pinch and had more time than money, I'd loc-tite red the splines and tack the nut in 3 places with good penetration. The heat treatment will be damaged, but at a location that it is not critical.

I have performed this type of repair on otherwise junkyard bound vehicles twice and it held. Once on a hyundai and another time on a Nissan truck XM. Others have done this on 4500's with both success and failure.

The main thing I'd be worried about with any welding in the XM is the possibility of slag breaking loose. A tiny bit of splatter can cause TERRIBLE damage if it goes through the gears.

FWIW the way I'd look at it is that as long as bad stuff doesn't go through the gears, the parts you would be abusing are parts that would be replaced with the shaft upgrade.

But then I haven't cracked a 4500...

 

Good advice above. Back at the dealer, we tried experimenting with different solutions. Saw JB weld fail, saw welding the nut to the gear fail too. Seemed like the best shot you had was to start with a gear that fit on to the shaft tight (ie. had to be pressed on), then used Dodge's updated clamp nut with red loctite. This was in the days before the fully splined shaft that's out now. Haven't looked at that.

 

What if the nut hasnt come off yet? Would you weld it just to be on the safe side? THem full spline shafts aint cheap. What do you guys think of this kit? http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Dodge...Q5fAccessories

 

I wouldn't trust it to anything that moves or cannot be easily inspected...

Just my .02

 

What do you mean moves?

 

I would try to do this once it's a pain to get to. I used the updated nut on mine and didn't have any problems with mine behind a TST PM Comp.

 

I didn't think it was to bad of a job, took about three hours, I used the updated nut with locktight. The truck only gets driven maybe 5k a year, basically when its snows my dad uses it as he is a snow plow driver for the state, and I just use it to haul my 4 wheeler and GN. At a later date I plan to rebuild the tranny and do the fully splined main shaft along with new syncros and what not.

For any one wondering These are the steps I did
Remove both drive shafts
Remove skid plate and center cross member
Remove transfer case
Remove Aluminum housing of trans, 8 10mm 2 point bolts(they should shoot the engineer that though those bolts were a good idea)
At this point you will see 5th gear and more then likely a nut just chilling.

I made my own tool to tighten the nut, I used a piece of Sch 80 2 inch pipe with 4 pieces of 1/4 key stock weld on and socket welded on the other end. I tighten the nuts to 250 ft lbs, then used my 3/4 in ratchet and really reffed on it.