I was replacing the front u-joint in the front drive shaft today, when I removed the old one I noticed that the driveshaft part of the u-joint had external retainers and smaller caps than the new u-joint, and the axle side had internal retainers and the same size caps as the new joint. It is like it is a conversion joint that was in the truck. Has anyone else seen this? Why would the driveshaft be differnt than the axle yoke?

 

I got a used drv shaft from a salvage yard, it was from a 1500 gasser, only difference was that the axel end of the shaft, had 2 different sized cups..pretty much as you describe, replaced U-joint with the proper one for my truck application and all was good, my 01 has a u-joint with all cups being the same size, as for the retaining clips its normal for this application to have external on the drv shaft side and internal on the axel yoke end, as the yoke straps retain the cups.

I suspect dodge used the same drv shaft on most trucks just swapped out different U-joints when they used different axels in different truck applications