How To Find The Drive Shaft On My Land Rover

To find the drive shafts on your Land Rover, it is best to lift the vehicle up on a ramp. Once hoisted and secured, you can see from underneath near to the back of the engine that there are solid metallic tubes which come from the transfer box. These are your Land Rover's drive shafts, or axles as some people refer to them. They have a pair of universal joints on each end that are connected to the hub behind each wheel.

1. Land Rovers are four-wheel drive vehicles. That means they have power coming from the engine which drives all four wheels at the same time. To do this the gearbox is connected to the axles, or drive shafts, which turn the front wheels and are connected by a singular shaft to the rear wheels called the prop shaft through a differential. As drive shafts are torque converters, they take the torsional (twisting) forces from the gearbox and turn the wheels.
2. As Land Rovers are four wheel drive, there are four drive shafts turn each of the four wheels. Therefore, running along the center of the vehicle is a prop shaft, which runs from the gearbox to the rear differential. From the differential—which is similar to a gearbox in itself which keeps both wheels from turning at the same rate—there are two more drive shafts. Again, these look like metal tubes and have universal joints on each end. On older Land Rovers, the drive shafts are of different lengths as the rear differential is offset to one side. This was dependent on the chassis layout and packaging of the mechanical parts.
3. Put simply, the drive shafts on your Land Rover are the connecting tubes from the wheels to the differentials and gearbox. They serve the purpose of being able to transfer the torque from the engine through to the gearbox and turns the wheels.