Alrighty. I just bought a 98 1500, 5.9 4x4. Runs and drives. However, it has no front axle shafts, and 4 wheel ABS. I noticed on hills its severely under powered, and when going ~40 mph it will shake pretty roughly. The spindles with the ABS rings are in the hubs still. Checked all sensors, and wires, they are good (unless I'm an idiot and missed something). Doesn't shift well, and the tachometer and speedo work intermittently. Is all this just from the axle shafts not being in??

 

How are you driving it with no axle shafts? Did you drain the front axle? Plug the holes where the axles went?

 

No the missing axle shafts don't cause any of the symptoms assuming "spindles" refers to the axle stub shafts in the hubs. Were the stub shafts torqued down properly ? The wheel bearings need proper preload or they get destroyed in very short time. The speedometer could drop out if there is no reading from any of the three wheel speed sensors but that would not affect the tachometer. Both of them being flakey (what about the other gauges ?) would point to more of an electric/electronic issue.

 

98 gets its speedometer reading from the rear wheel speed sensor. PCM doesn't care if the other sensors are there, or not. 4WAL was an option on these trucks, a significant percentage of them don't have it.

 

Are you sure about that ? For 98+ the PCM gets the speed information from the ABS module where the speed sensor(s) connect to. On my 2001 with all wheel ABS the speedometer worked when the rear sensor failed.

 

Likely the difference between RWAL, and 4WAL. I don't have front wheel speed sensors, and the speedometer works fine.(though a tad slow....)