I had the honor of replacing the driver's side axle this weekend. The good news was that it was about 30 minutes of work. The bad news was that it was about 3 hours of pondering what the manual ment.
I used the Hayes manual. Pretty simple - replace your axle in 9 easy steps. But I wanted to add a few details.
- You must lift both wheels, not just the side you are working on.
- I dowsed the axle, tie-rod, and lower control arm nuts with liquid wrench and sat around studying the book and having coffee while it did its work.
- You need a breaker bar to get those nuts off. And not one of those wimpy 3/8" drives. Get a real 1/2" drive bar that's good and heavy and lo-n-g! You'll need it.
- The lower control arm bolts are the ones you take off. There are two of them, on the bottom of the bracket, one either side of the middle nut that has the cotter pin. You don't need to take off the center nut with the cotter pin.
- I loosen the tie rod pin by 25-30 firm, controlled hammer blows the bolt from the bottom side. I didn't want to mess up the threads. Eventually it popped right out - easy - right?
- The lower control arm bolts came right out, but the lower bracket had rusted to the main body of the tie-rod steering spindle. After a couple more encouraging blows with the hammer the separated enough to get a screwdriver between and I was able to force them a part. If you don't have both wheels up to reduce the pressure from that stabilizer bar, you will never get them to separate.
- With the tie rod and the lower arm separated the main part of the wheel hangs free and can be pulled/pushed out of the way to get the axle all the way out of the wheel hole.
- The axle separated from the transmission easy with a couple of jerks. I tried a lever by the inner boot/transmission case. I don't know which did the trick.
- The REBUILT axle didn't slide into the splines! I had to file the end of each spline on the axle so it would slip into the transmission's spline. It then slipped in with a couple of light taps. (The rebuilding process mangled the original spline ends.)
- It took a while to line up the holes of the lower control arm since they have a little spring pressure - if I'd only had another hand. But in 5 minutes it was all back together.