This is what we are dealing with. This axle is made up of two seperate torsion tubes that are welded together.
I was going to have to cut the end caps off of the tubes but to get access to the caps I first had to seperate the two tubes. I used a grinder and cut all the welds, being careful not to damage the tubes themself. As a side note you'll notice the grease zerk next to another weld. It turns out the weld is just covering up the original grease zerk location. It turns out that that zerk corresponded to a grease channel cut in the shaft bearing inside the tube. A previous owner unknowingly moved the zerk away form the grease channel which may have contributed to the severe wear in the axle.
Once seperated I used the same angle head grinder to cut the end caps off, kind of like opening a tin can. I was attempting to cut through the pipe only, and keep the center shaft/nub intact.
This is what they looked like when I started.
Once the pipe was cut all the way around and cleaned up one tap with a sledge and out popped the torsion shaft. I had no idea what to expect. I thought there would be some springs or some rubber bearings inside but to my amazement it was just a shaft. The shaft provides all the flex for this axle. It has what looks like a stainless bearing/bushing at the swing arm end and two inch slug welded to the other end. That slug end is welded to the pipe creating the end cap that I cut out.
Once cleaned up you could see that the SS bearing/bushing on the torsion shaft had a little bit of wear on the superior aspect, but it wasn't that bad. The side to side measurement of the bearing was something like1.789 and the top to bottom was something like 1.749. But the section of the tube that corresponded to the wear in the bearing showed severe wear. The thickness of the tube wall is around 3/8 inch and about 1/4 inch of that was gone.
So I had two problems. Problem one was the bearing wear and problem two the outer tube wear. To solve problem number two I just flipped the tubes around end to end because the end that had the cap cut out was in original condition. It took a little work with a round file to clean out all the rust, but the bearing on the torsion shaft fit great. As far as solving problem one, the only way to correct that would be having a new one machined and that sounded like a lot of work. So I simply switched torsion shafts from right side to left and left to right. This caused a rotation of the shaft bearing some 110 degrees moving the wore portion of the bearing from the top of the axle to a more rear facing position. After getting everything slid back together It was just a matter of welding it back up. The below pic shows the finish axle along with a wooden form I made that had the bracket locations and the swing arm locations set at the 35 degrees. The form was make prior to taking the axle apart. It made putting it back together a no brainer. The axle seems to be solid as a rock with little to no slop now. Kept the axle original and saved the cost of a new one. The whole project took about 4 hrs, and required a grinder, a round file and a friend with a welder. Hope this can help someone someday.
