Am I asking for trouble or...?

 

Basically... am I looking at an eventual sudden catastrophic failure?

 

Are you looking at the slip boot or CV boot? The answer is no regardless but if the slip boot no need to worry at all.

 

Mine has been torn for 50k miles. I do have zip tie around it to keep the boot from slapping my jeep.
So far - so good.

 

My rear boot is also a little torn from rubbing against rocks and what not, I lost the clamp in on of the ends, so I used a zip tie to put it back in place, and I've been running it like that for the past 40k miles, no issues.

 

My boot was roughed up a little from contacting the stock evap cooler skid. Replaced it with a Poison Spyder skid and it's been fine.

 

This is what happened to me. Evap skid got to it. Glad to hear it's not gonna be an issue. Thanks to all that replied!!!

 

Terraflex has a good little mod to move it 1" to the driver side so it won't contact the boot anymore. Check YouTube.

 

The time that you might have this become an issue is if you ever need to removed one end, either from the TC side or the diff side. In order to do so, the shaft needs to compress a bit to gain clearance to remove it from the one side. If the boot has been torn for some time, you might see an issue with it extending again to reinstall it. This very thing happened to me when I regeared. I was able to get it mounted back to the the rear pinion....but it was really difficult. It LOOKED like I got it extended and installed again, but really I was just yanking that joint apart. Wrapped up what had been an extremely long day, lowered the lift, reprogrammed the computer, went to back out and zing, plop....DS tore right apart at the diff side joint and fell to the ground. It was comical....all we could do was laugh. Anyhow, there's a real life example of when that could be an issue. Normal driving/wheelin' this is no big deal.

I needed a new rear DS in a pinch, and found a factory takeoff around town for $50. When I went to install it, I questioned if it could be installed flip flop so that the boot wouldn't contact that evap skid. Been running like that for over a year now and no issues.....and no ripped boot on that replacement DS.

 

Good info!!!