We’ve finished tracing the flow of torque from the motor down a very simple path (skipping most of it actually; the driveshaft will have to be one of the last mechanical parts I get for the truck), and now we’ve made it to the wheel hubs. Today’s last cobblestone in that road is actually two parts, the axles.

These are 35-spline axles custom-made along with the housing by Dutchman to my length specification. And there’s something to say about the length that I didn’t bring up before. When building a custom rear end like this, it’s common that the pumpkin would be placed in the center so that it looks right from the back, in spite of the pinion being off-center. The driveshaft just goes back at an angle, which is small enough that the universal joints aren’t affected.

Since I will be mounting battery boxes to either side of the driveshaft, and in fairly close proximity, this isn’t an option. I’ll need to keep the driveshaft centered, and so the answer is to offset the pumpkin slightly instead. As a result one of the shafts is longer than the other, and the tubes on the axle housing are also of unequal length. In many front-wheel-drive cars, unequal-length driveshafts are one of several (disputed) causes of a phenomenon called torque steer as one shaft flexes more than the other. Fortunately the difference in length here is small enough that I won’t have to worry about that, even under high acceleration. So in the end it doesn’t matter much to me, since the offset is very slight and only the bottom of the differential will be visible from behind anyway.

Link to today’s part.