We recently had a customer bring us a C5 Corvette that two different local repair shops had told them had a seized motor. Replacing the entire engine would have been really expensive both in parts and labor. We had a sneaking suspicion it was something else when the customer brought it in though. We decided to remove the torque tube instead of the engine and see if that was the problem and sure enough it was. The torque tube on a Corvette is basically a housing that contains the drive shaft. The drive shaft rides on a set of bearings inside the torque tube. Somehow the inner shaft that spins had become dislodged and pushed backwards inside the torque tube. This caused the bearings and the inner shaft to seize up and stop turning. Because of the torque tube being seized it prevented the engine from being able to turn over. You can see the damage to the inner shaft in the pics below and the hole in the front of the torque tube housing where the inner shaft and bearing should go. The shaft basically pushed back into this hole and locked up in there. We were able to simply swap out the customers torque tube and get them back on the road saving thousands over doing an engine swap.

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