Inliners International Forums General Discussion Engines GM HEI

I am in the process of going through a HEI unit. I have a couple of spares. Question? The unit I have been using has a one piece shaft. All of the other units I have, have a two-piece shaft. The question is-Was there a reason for the two-piece shaft? I believe the two-piece shaft units are of a later model than the one piece. Was the two piece shaft unit designed to relieve some sort of stress that was occuring in this area? Any info. appreciated.

Tom Langdon who worked for GM told me the following story;
Chevy was having distributer failures on on the 250 type engines.It seemed the distributer bore in the blocks were not always done properly,angled slightly, putting a side load on the shaft and oil pump.It was a faster engineering change to add a flex joint to the distributer shaft than to bore the hole correctly, indifferent machine operators, dull tooling and all that.

Thanks Tony- That might be what caused some of my problems. In my post under low oil pressure-I am trying to find out why my cam bearings failed. Thanks.