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Well, I broke down as I was sick of having a stock length spline driveline that loved to pull out when it was least opportune, granted it was nicely extended as I milled all of it to thousandths of inches to fit, that doesn't change the fact that 5" of spline travel can't keep up with my front suspension. Especially when 2.5" of that was strictly for compression. So I thought well, trail gear long spline kits are $270 at Olympic, and I hate spending money on my truck I don't recoup somehow (that's how I have only about $3000 into the entire purchase and build as it sits right now) so I reviewed my options. PTO shafts with slip yokes to make a round driveline ? Maybe but those aren't always the tightest of fits. Square tube? I can take play out of square tube easy. So with a fresh cv driveline I just traded my friend for, for my old one, I decided square tube was my plan. So here's a quick build thread to my perfectly balanced and vibration and virtually noise free square tube driveline. And yes I ran it in 4high with hubs locked up to 60 mph no problem! Basically it has 14" of inner shaft and 16" of outer shaft, built to have 4" of compression and 10" of extension at ride height, and it worked out perfect. I tried the cv to the outer shaft dead on, and the u joint end was an extremely close fit into the inside of the inner tube, so that was virtually dead on without trying, but I phased the u joints and added padding to the inner shaft to take out all but about 1/16th of an inch of play to make sure it wouldn't bind against itself or anything. I am also going to tap 4 zerk fittings into the outer shaft to keep it full of grease all the time. At any rate it's super strong and works awesome and cost me $0.00 to build. Just a few hours!

Yup, I made a rear square tube driveshaft with receiver tube and some 1/4" wall 2"x2" on a cheap build '81 Toyota one time. We never intended on it seing highway but I had it up to 60 with the square rear shaft and it ran just fine with very little vibration. For a front application you should be totally fine. It's crazy how good that stuff works if you take the time to phase everything and line it up squarely. Alot of grease helps :).

The real bonus is that you can't really hurt the stuff no matter how hard you try...

nice work

Good idea . How did you balance everything ?

Thank you guys! And it "technically" it's not balanced. However it is about the tightest possible tolerances I could get out of it, so therefore it being so dead on I don't even need to balance it. As long as it's got grease, it's good to go! And yes, tough as hell no doubt. If I ever broke this that would be one for the "wreckords" hahaha. So far so good though and I really dig the look of it under there too.

i wouldn't mind seeing a few pictures of it all bolted up. looks military like

Sure thing! I will snap a couple pictures tomorrow when it's light out, I think it looks really cool under there.