Precision Brand Half-Shaft U-joints - 5 days and loose already

[NewZed]

A comment/recommendation and a question -

 

Short-

Precision brand u-joints seem to be of surprisingly low quality.

 

Can anyone recommend a better u-joint brand than Precision, that’s not super-spendy? Not brute strength, but tight, high-quality and durable. I put four new u-joints in and two of them are loose already, after 5 days. The car is a stock 76 280Z manual and I don’t use it hard, although I do like to get to speed quickly.

 

 

Long -

In my efforts to reduce the clunk in my stock 1976 280Z with manual transmission, I found that I had a loose, dry u-joint bearing cup in a half-shaft. I replaced the half-shaft with one from a parts car and the clunk got quieter so I went down to O’Reilly’s and bought four of their Precision brand, Hecho en USA, Part #393 U-joints. List Price $33.88, Net Price $19.99.

 

After the battle to get the old ones out, the new ones went in easily. Everything was clean, no dropped bearing cups, no loose grease or dust to dirty things up. Used a vice and shimmed the flange to get the cups parallel to avoid any binding. They slid right in. The Precision joints only come with one clip, so there is no fine-tuning axial play as with Nissan brand. They felt nice and tight, but moved smoothly, when I was done. So I pumped them full of U-joint approved lithium grease and installed the half-shafts. The clunk was dramatically diminished and the drive train felt tighter. Life is good.

 

Five days later, after a few drives and a couple of hard runs through the gears (but no standing drag-style starts), I started to hear a little clanking from the back again. I crawled under the car to see if a nut had come loose or if some new part was wearing out and found that two of the four new u-joints were already loose. I can see play at the grease seal when twisting by hand.

 

So it looks like Precision is either not very precise in their manufacturing or their materials are of low quality. Anyone planning u-joint replacement should avoid these u-joints.

 

Back to my original question – can anyone recommend a brand of u-joint, better than Precision?

 

And/or is anyone familiar with the McQay-Norris brand, they have what looks like a higher quality option for a few dollars more (as far as I can tell from O’Reilly’s web page) that I can get special-ordered through the same store.

 

I was really surprised that the Precisions failed so quickly. All of the stores sell them and they are not the least expensive (cheapest) of the various brands available.

 

I assume that some will think that I “must have†done something wrong. But I’m fairly certain that my installation was cleaner and easier than many I have seen described. Has anyone else recently had a Precision joint go bad? Or be bad from the start? I hate to trash a brand name but I spent some time and effort installing what appears to be a bad part.

 

Thanks for any help.

[rejracer]

I've used GMB U-joints. They work well, but are not as high quality as the Nissan or Spicer u-joints.

[NewZed]

Thanks rejracer.

 

I probably should not have trashed the Precision brand. And this may not be the right forum for my comments/question anyway, since I was looking for smooth shifting and driving not high performance. I get the impression that Precisions are very tough, durable and asequate. Mine just had a lot of slack in them right out of the box. Tight tolerances are expensive, that's why the OEMs are more expensive, I assume, and that's why Nissan recommends shimming the U-joints to spec. with the installation clips. I think the Z drive train design is very sensitive to play in the components.

 

I ended up using the old Nissan half-shafts from my parts car, probably original, but still tight. The car sat for ten years so that's ten extra years of use for me.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.