<light comes on>
Ok, now I get it -- I confused direction-of-rotation with torsional loading.
My sincerest apologies to anyone I've confused this evening.
Rusty J

Lawrence Johnson set me straight thusly:
>Rusty,  take a pencil and visualize it as your right side half shaft: with
the
>eraser at the transmission and the point at the wheel. Now mark an arrow on
the
>eraser in the direction that the transmission is trying to turn the shaft.
Now on
>the pointed end, mark an arrow in the direction  the wheel is trying to
resist
>rotation. These two arrows should be pointing in opposite directions. If you
were
>to simply "Flip the axleshafts end-for-end" then the arrows would still be
>pointing in the same directions. This means that the force from the
transmission
>and the resistive force from the wheel would still be wearing the CV joints
on
>the same ball races. However, if you took your pencil and visualized it as
the
>left half shaft, you would see that both the transmission force direction
and the
>wheel resistive direction are opposite to the arrows on the pencils. This
means
>that the CV joints would be wearing on the other side of the ball races.
Almost
>like having new joints. Should buy you another 50-70 thousand miles (well
lubed
>of course).
>Larry