when you all mention Schnorr washers, which ones are you referring to since there are several models?

The schnoor washers people mention here are commonly known as Belleville spring lock washers. Here is an example:
https://www.mcmaster.com/93501A030/

This has been covered in detail in many other threads in the 18 years that this thread slept... i suggest doing some searching and find one of them to learn from.

Standard practice for DDs and such as others have mentioned. In my experience, if the wear is significant the driveline will be a noticeable amount "lashier". YMMV

Of course, new CVs and driveshafts have never been as cheap and as easy to find as lately.

We Race Off Road Professionally. We inspect, replace the CV's after every 400 race miles or after every race that is longer than that. Our inner CV's are different than our outers. But we will typically move the left outside to the right outside, and since they only go on one way, they must be flipped in the process. (same with inners) We will typically obviously inspect all surfaces, but will replace all balls and star with new when this is done every time. We've noticed that we can get about 750 Race miles safely on a CV this way. So far, we haven't had a racing failure yet. Also using specialty grease, with a mixture of components. Running LS3 with Fortin Sequencial Transmission with Torque Converter. 3500lb car.

That works. What's important is swapping them side to side, not flipping them. Visualize it: If you only flip the CV shaft and keep it on the same side, the torque on the joints and shaft are in the same direction. swapping side to side changes the torque to the other direction.

Just don't swap the axles from one side to the other. Once you use an axle on the left side, it should stay on the left side....

Why?

I think you are thinking of torsion bars, which are pre-stressed for twisting in a particular direction, and are therefore marked left or right. OTOH, drive axles see torque in both directions, in one direction when accelerating, and in the other direction when coasting or downshifting.

Axles take a lot of torque, especially in higher hp applications. We don't think of axles as twisting, but the do, at least a little. Twisting them one way and then swapping them so they get twisted the other way, can result in a failed axle. Which can cause a lot of damage, or an accident. This is all per Carroll Smith. On a stock car, or a lower hp one, you might get away with it. I'm sure people do it all the time.

No, I am not thinking about torsion bars. Drive axles see a lot more torque in the drive direction.

Sway-A-Way puts "L" and "R" on the ends of their axles and wants you to keep them on the left and right sides, respectively. They are revamping their website but you can see what they say here:

https://pmbperformance.com/products/sway-a-way-free-floating-axle-for-porsche-914-20-25-pair

Here is what is said:

"The axles are marked on the end with an L for left and an R for right. Once installed, they should stay on the correct side. They can be flipped end for end as long as they stay on the correct side."

Guys like Rader and Copans say it is a bad idea too.

Not reversing the stress is the long time received wisdom. There are reasonable arguments for this. So imagine my surprise when maybe 10 - 15 years ago Porsche put out a bulletin for its Carrera Cup race cars asking owners to reverse the half shafts half way through the season (and, if I recall, either replace them for next year, or maybe these only had a one year life anyway). So I'd say there must be some engineering science on the other side, too.

For the last 10 years at least, the Cup Car technical manuals have said:

"Driveshafts already used must NOT be swapped from left to right and vice versa"

or:

"Do not interchange used drive shafts left-right"

I don't know but I bet Porsche were trying to increase the life of the CV joints themselves and I bet this advice led to bigger problems with broken drive shafts.

The bottomline is today the smart thing is to not swap drive shafts from one side to the other. This is common knowledge at race shops.....

Typically the shiny wear mark on the channels of a CV is not exactly in the middle of the channel. If you want to move where the balls spend the most time, just take the CV off the axle, turn the CV around, and put it back. The balls will now be on a less worn place.

While there are assertions that these two large pieces (the outer and inner) are "sided" and must be kept in the same relationship to each other, the first isn't always true, and both, as far as I can see, are immaterial.

The outer can be distinguished in this way only by a vey small groove near one edge. This is usually found at the boot side, but nothing in the construction of the part is asymmetric.

Some batches of the inner grooved part have a small raised area on one end. However, not all do. I'm looking at one in my collection sitting on my desk which lacks this feature. The most that raised area could do is move the center of the inner piece a millimeter one way or the other,, which is insignificant relative to the travel of the balls in the grooves.

CVs are not like the old British Brown Bess musket, where each part of each firearm was hand fitted at the armory..

That was one of those interim bulletins. And I may have misinterpreted it. I had to take a bolt and nut into my hands to persuade myself that swapping axle ends but keeping them on the same side didn't reverse the rotation. But it didn't. However, not clear just what benefit for anything swapping same side ends would be. For us shade tree guys, if you put one side in "backwards," then recognized that, you wouldn't have to sweat it.

You can't just take the CV off the axles and flip it. The inner star has a recess that helps get the splines lined up. So, you would need to disassemble the CV to do this. The better idea is to take both axles off and move just the CV joints from one side to the other while leaving the axles on their respective sides.

There is a recess, but it is not essential to getting the joint back on. All else being equal, no reason not to have the recess pointing to the center of the axle. But if you have something else in mind, no real impediment.

You go ahead and assemble and install the CV joint incorrectly if you want.....and run axles right to left and left to right too....

I leave the axles alone. Old learning, no reason not to.

Though when I was having hollow axles break I don't think I paid that much attention as to which spare solid axle I had in the trailer. Never had a solid one fail. Of course, I didn't have the HP you have. CV races eventually wear to where you can feel the groove and it makes sense to toss them, but never had one fail.

Most CV inspection seems due to boot failure, at least on race cars where you can't hear a little extra noise..

Scott, thanks for the references on not swapping drive shafts from left to right. In high HP race cars that are stressing their drive shafts much more, I can see how this advice applies. In our street cars, not so much.

I guess it depends on how hard you drive your street car.....it's not like Porsche put overly beefy axles on their street cars. The smart thing to do is NOT swap axles side to side....why risk it when it is so easy to not do.

I have done cv's a number of time. I have never kept track of which ball goes with which race, just took them apart, cleaned everything and - given there are no wear issues - just reassembled them with no issues a many thousand km's of driving without issues.

My theory has been that the balls and races move around so much that they do not generate wear patterns so everything - barring wear - is interchangeable.

D.