| [GMCnet] Half Shafts - long sob story [message #105127] |
Fri, 05 November 2010 10:14  |
druber
Messages: 58
Registered: March 2004
Location: Syracuse, IN
Karma:
|
Member |
|
|
Our coach was vibrating pretty badly under acceleration, particularly when
hitting a dip in the road while accelerating, indicating half shaft
problems. Well, this has been a frustrating week rebuilding them. I had a
couple shafts out of an Eldorado from a junk yard in Austin, TX, which I
first took apart for salvage parts. One outer was no good, but the inners
were in very good shape, and that is what I thought was needed. Next, I
took apart the shafts out of our coach. Both inners and one of the outers
were worn beyond belief. I would say the three balls on the inners had worn
into their sockets 1/16". One of the outers had been rebuilt by somebody
that remachined all the ball races substantially oversized, enough that you
could visually tell the balls were bigger than original ones. The ball
races were in bad shape, being badly fatigued and fretted. That's the
first flag I would like to raise. I wonder if the resizing of those races
was enough to get past the original surface heat treatment, and got into
softer metal thus causing the abnormally high wear, fatigue, and fretting.
The second flag I would like to raise is one that will cause most of your
eyebrows to rise, and that is I packed all these joints about 50000 miles
ago with Mobil 1 grease, and they all looked OK at that time. The grease
did not look good at this point, so that along with the excessive wear makes
me wonder about the wisdom of using Mobil 1 in this application.
The second part of this saga has to do with putting things back together. I
reused the outer boots as they were both the old blue "superboots" that I
think will far outlast any new boots that are available. The third flag I
would like to raise is that the new wave of inner boots will not go onto the
CV joint casting far enough to crimp the sheet metal into the retention
groove in the casting. Evidently the tooling used to make these sheet metal
stampings has worn to the point where the three corners are rounded off
enough so that they do not allow the boot to go onto the casting far enough
to be crimped. The same Chinese guy must make all of them as I tried two
from NAPA and two from Autozone, and they were all the same way. The fourth
and final flag is nothing new. The clamps they supply with these boots and
the clamps you can buy at NAPA and Autozone are not worth carrying home. I
am told that Bob Drewes has found a clamp from McMaster Carr that works like
the old double clamps. Bob, if that is true, would you chime in and let us
in on your findings??
Druber
_______________________________________________
GMCnet mailing list
List Information and Subscription Options:
http://temp.gmcnet.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gmclist
|
|
|
|
GMCforum
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
