So Will came over tonight to swap a spare stub shaft I have onto his driver's side inner shaft to replace the one he busted at Tellico. It started off as pretty routine stuff, we first had to take the u-joint out of my spare shaft. Will took the c-clips out while I got out the needed tools and we went to town, beat out one side of the u-joint easy enough and moved onto the other side. This side would not budge, we attacked it for atleast 30-45 minutes and it didn't move a millimeter. We then went to Advanced Auto to rent a pulley puller or something along those lines to try to force the u-joint loose. Advanced was closed, so we drove down to the Autozone in the 'hood. They are going to close in 45 minutes, so we stayed in the parking lot to to work on the axle shaft so Will could return the rented puller in time. This cracked out hobo came up and kept telling us how to do it, we kept blowing him off, but he wouldn't leave so we finally let him have a whack at it. He looked at it for about 5 second before he realized Will forgot to take 2 of the c-clips out (whoops). Will and I started laughing about it, and the hobo (oddly enough, named old Greg) thought we were laughing at him and threatened to cut our ankles if we didn't stop laughing at him. We apologized, so he kept working on the shaft, but never managed to get the damn u-joint out. So we took it back to my house and tried to whack at it a little more. While doing this, ANOTHER homeless guy comes up to us and begs for money, INSIDE OF MY OWN DAMN GARAGE! We told him we didn't have anything and he wandered back to the bridge he lives under (he actually told us he lives under a bridge). By this time, I was pissed off at the u-joint and I think Will was afraid to be in Macon any longer, so I pulled out the cutoff wheel. I cut the ears off the inner axle shaft (all the splines were crushed by this point anyway from old Greg pounding on the axle in the Autozone parking lot) and cut the u-joint in half. Now, we FINALLY had a free outer shaft to put on Will's inner shaft and u-joint. We got everything back together, except for a little bindage in one direction, but he decided it was good enough for now and was going to redo the u-joint this weekend at River Rock. I tried to get a shot of Will drive up the side of my shed to make sure his locker still worked fine, but I missed the photo, lol.
Topic: How NOT to swap an axle shaft (Read 890 times)
