The intermediate shaft is for balancing both the shafts so that they have equal length. This eliminates torque steer, ie steering pulling to one side when accelerating as the difference in length would result in uneven weight of the shafts. If you can live with that, you can omit the intermediate shaft.
One other option is to replace the outer CV joint if that is the only part that is faulty and this would be much cheaper than the complete shaft.
Friday, July 12th, 2013 AT 7:14 AM