Drive shaft maintenance

Drive shaft maintenance – even if you maintain your drive shafts perfectly, sooner or later signs of wear and damage to the shaft and especially the u-joint bearings will appear.

Make sure your drive shafts are regularly checked and maintained by a drive shaft expert to detect any damage early on and prevent unplanned shutdowns. With continuous maintenance, you will not only prevent serious machine damage, but also significantly reduce your maintenance costs.

Off-Highway Powertrain Services offers a comprehensive service for the whole powertrain.

1. Drive shaft maintenance

Maintenance for drive shafts should be conducted on a regular basis, but in practice, it is often not performed correctly or completely. Premature or unplanned shutdowns are the consequence. Entrust this important task to experts.
Off-Highway Powertrain Services offers a complete maintenance service, starting with professional lubrication of drive shafts according to manufacturer’s specifications and angular measurements, all the way to additional vibration measurements by qualified service experts.

2. Drive shaft pick-up and provision of a substitute drive shaft

Even though visual inspections on-site can be helpful, it is often worthwhile to disassemble the drive shaft and take it to the workshop for a closer inspection. Off-Highway Powertrain Services will disassemble your drive shaft and provide you with a substitute drive shaft for the duration of the repair, so that your operations can continue. We are also able to disassemble and transport heavy duty drive shafts.

3. Assessment

Assessing your drive shaft is a multi-step process. A preliminary visual inspections gives us a first impression about the degree of wear and the general condition of the drive shaft. Hardness and ultrasound measurements provide information about possible tears in the material or the surface hardness of the drive shaft. Both are indicators for increased stress on the drive shaft and resulting material fatigue. By dismantling the drive shaft, we can also check other components like the universal joint or grease in the joint.

4. Identifying the cause of damage

Off-Highway Powertrain will not only take care of the replacement of your drive shaft and any damaged components, but also identify the cause of damage. If significant wear occurs prematurely, we recommend an analysis of the complete powertrain to identify and correct detrimental vibrations or misalignments. Too much stress on drive shafts also lead to premature wear and tear and can easily be identified via torque analyses. This damage can be prevented. Let us advise you and choose a drive shaft which is designed and calculated according to its requirements. Requirements may differ depending on the application. The higher the applied torque, the more important it is to choose components and material of a sturdy quality. In production industries, like paper, steel or packaging production, the focus is more on high life-spans of bearings to ensure reliable operations now and in the future.

5. Repair

Due to our association with Walterscheid Powertrain Group and its partner brand Uni-Cardan, we have 20 service centres all over Europe with fully-equipped workshops at our disposal where we can conduct maintenance and repairs of drive shafts. We can also employ the services of Uni-Cardan in-house and access a wide range of drive shafts and spare parts, and even heavy duty drive shafts.

If the drive shaft assessment points to damage on certain components, the broken parts will be replaced and reinstalled according to manufacturer’s instructions, while maintaining the original quality. In the next step, the shaft will be assembled, pressing and aligning of the tube included, and then adjusted on the straightening press. Finally, we perform a dynamic balancing of the shaft and lubricated it with special grease, so the maintenance will be up to original standards.

6. Mounting and alignment

The final mounting and alignment of the drive shaft should be done by experts as well.

Even components of the highest quality will not perform as intended if they are not properly installed and aligned. Misalignment often leads to axial and torsional vibration, overheating, excessive wear and reduced lifespan of the whole powertrain. Taking thermal growth effects under different conditions into consideration, the experts of Off-Highway Powertrain Services will align your drive shaft correctly using high-end laser technology.

Put the assessment and maintenance of drive shafts into the hands of qualified experts in order to find the cause of damage. This is the only way to detect faults by increased wear early on and prevent your machines from deterioration.