We just did a complete front end replacement. K member,A-arms,axles,struts, etc. Well the drive shaft was off and car was pushed/moved. Now put drive shaft in and car will shift into gears, but will only move about 1 foot frontwards or backwards before binding up and stopping.
Does drive shaft have to be in a particular position to mesh with rear end?

And OR, what could we have possibly done wrong? Axles both seem to have snapped in just fine. Everything bolted right up. No problems with reassembly.

 

Just out of curiosity , did you also change differentials that might not have the same gear ratio? You might try removing the front driveshaft and see if the bind is gone.

 

No sir, we did not change any differentials. Only K member,axles,A-arms, sway links,rotors,calipers, etc.
We drove the vehicle to garage after it was wrecked, so gears all worked.

FORD garage said something about not having drive shaft properly aligned? As we pushed vehicle while drive shaft was off. ??????? We tried rotating drive shaft 3 times to different positions and refastening.

We are old school mechanics, drive shaft position never mattered but this is AWD vehicle, does this matter?

 

There is such a thing as driveshaft phasing , but Not sure if it can stop a vehicle from moving. Vibration problems, yes, moving I don't think so.

When you say axles, exactly what does that include?

 

Well i may be using the wrong term. Both front CV axle shafts. The tech at local FORD garage also mentioned maybe we were sold too long an axles?? We did (kinda) set them side by side with originals and they appeared to be the same.
He was trying to be helpful, but was in too much of a hurry to be real specific.

Ohh we did replace the seal at tranny on drivers side. The passenger side was sooo far in and seemed fine so we skipped doing that one. Sure hope that doesn't come back and bite our butts. :-)

 

I should have inquired as to what model vehicle you were working on.
Now when talking half shafts instead of driveshafts that usually come from the transfer case up to the front differential it is a whole different ball game.
Depending on what was done and when, there are a bunch of things that cold have happened and you will need to start from the beginning and even then it will require some process of elimination to pin down exactly what went wrong.
Not knowing everything that was done you will need to get the vehicle back up on stands and start checking each side and reviewing your work. Unless someone has had this exact problem before , each step will need to be checked and confirmed before offering any useful suggestions.

 

Guys, you are NOT going to believe this. When she hit the culvert with the vehicle it broke the rim and ruined the tire. Well we had another FORD rim with same size tire and put it on. Well two different brands, different rim and it was like 3/8 " taller.
Unbelievably that made it not want to even get out of garage. We put the spacesaver spare on and everything spins just fine.
I sure want to thank you for YOUR time scratching your heads for us and apologize for not catching this ahead of time.
We got the vehicle for 300$ thinking we might make a dollar on it, lol There we went thinking again. And then when the thing wouldn't go, we really began to panic.
Well, we may have picked up on the problem sooner, but the FORD garage guy kinda threw us off track a bit by saying the driveshaft had to be whatever ,synchronized.

 

Thanks for the update ! Glad you found the problem.

Don't feel badly , sometimes things go well, in spite, of my best efforts, lol