TRUCK VIBRATIONS? Could be Driveline ANGLES! How to measure them!

Hi everyone, Charlie fell down on the job again but it's only because I wanted to talk about driveline angles. So critical measurement is if a driveline angle is too steep it's going to destroy things like u-joints, cause loop joint damage, even maybe potentially damage the pinion and the differential and in the transmission. Also not only just the steepness of the angle of the driveline but also the angle of the driveline as it's coming out of the transmission toward the back of the truck. So let's say that your flywheel housing that your transmission is mounted to got cracked and you had to replace it. Well it is possible to put one of those on a truck at a slightly off center and if that happens maybe it's only 30 thousandths of an inch off when you mounted it onto the engine block. But that 30 thousandths of an inch as you start to come backwards simple geometry tells us that everything attached to that thing is going to start being off center more and more the further away we get from it. By the time you get back to this differential at this pinion that 30 40 thousandths might have turned into 180 thousandths, 200 thousandths or much, I'm going the wrong direction, but a much higher number. Something that's definitely going to cause problems with u-joints and differentials and things. So those are all little critical method things that if you lift a truck you want to make sure you don't exceed your driveline angles. If you have airbag suspension issues you want to see what that driveline angle is with those airbags at normal air pressures and then make sure that you're not coming up too high or sitting too low. And one of the best tools to do that with is a digital inclinometer. So I'm going to show you guys what I have right here. This guy right here and it's in my little box. I gotta dig it out. This is a digital inclinometer. I'm gonna turn it on. All right so this is a digital inclinometer and as you can see when the angle changes so does the number change. And this is such a simple tool to use. I can just very simply put it right here on my drive shaft and see that my drive shaft angle, let me see if I can get closer so you guys can see it, is 8.90 degrees. And I can move this to the other side of the slip yoke and see that that angle is 9.05 degrees. So this is an awesome little tool when doing this. If I exceeded what I wanted to see on here I could go and adjust my height control valve for my airbags and for my suspension. I could potentially look and even maybe tell a customer that had a lifted truck that was having excessive vibrations and say hey the reason why you're vibrating so bad at highway speed is because your angle is excessive because you lifted this truck without shimming anything or doing anything to compensate for that lift. So these are really great inexpensive little tools that you can get to measure that with. And in another video I'll talk to you when I'm talking about about flywheel housing. But this guy is great at doing that and they're pretty affordable. So I recommend every mechanic get one of these because you're going to need to know driveline inclinations at some point in time. So cool tool to have. Thanks!