[HO455]

Yesterday was another exciting day with the WMB. After running down to Milwaukee and then up to Vancouver and then home. Well almost home (10 blocks to go.) After pulling off of the freeway and stopping, I started away from the stop sign when there was a loud BAM. Then lots of very depressing grinding sounds. Uhhhggg.....
The truck would not move itself out of the intersection. Fortunately it was on a slope and several young men jumped out to help me push it off to the side of the road. I called my buddy Karl, who luckily was just leaving work and could meet me at my house in 15 minutes. After I hoofed it home and threw some straps in my S10 Blazer we headed off and towed the WMB home. With some manual pushing and pulling we got it into the driveway. I have always been amazed by how easy the WMB is to push. On flat pavement it has always been relatively easily to push around.
Anyway today I put it up in the air so I could get a listen to figure out whether the problem was in the transmission or the GV unit. With things securely on jack stands I fired things up and there was no noise in park, then no noise in neutral which wasn't the case last night. Then into drive and still no noise but the speedometer was showing 25 mph. What the...
So carefully I got out and looked. First thing I noticed is that the rear wheels were not turning. Looking further I see the front drive shaft is spinning ,but the rear one isn't. Bingo! The tail end of the front shaft was stuck in the carrier bearing and just spinning like everything was okay. I literally have a 2 piece drive shaft.
Big sign of relief! This will be so much less expensive than every other scenario I had come up with on the overnight. I've had a large number of transmission failures over the years. Most of them were in my GTO. Use to be I would have to replace/rebuild the transmission in it every 18 to 24 months. So needless to say I was expecting the worst.
I will see what the drive line shop has to say on Monday about why it sheared. I'm pretty sure it wasn't from the monster torque generated from the 350..
There has been a slight vibration at highway speeds for a while. It did become more pronounced after the transmission swap and especially when in overdrive. Maybe there was some bad machining that led to a crack that eventually failed. The old transmission was pretty slushy and the new one shifts firmer and the GV shifts even more firmly which I would consider to be contributing factors in the failure, if in fact there was a crack. I'm certain that all of the full throttle testing I've been doing as of late had nothing to do with it.
I feel lucky in that the drive shaft stayed trapped in the front of the carrier bearing and didn't go flailing around destroying everything in its path. That and it waited to fail until I was close to home and not in Vancouver or worse on the I-5 bridge in traffic. All in all this could have been much worse than it is.