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replaced diff bushing, reassembled driveshaft CV !

619 views 0 replies 1 participant last post by  bjv 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
If you read all the way through this I will tell you how to reassemble the stock driveshaft CV joint. Maybe this will help someone. Sorry this is such a long story.

We just had an adventure with my driveshaft, about 8+ hours worth spread over the weekend. My V is near 100k and has had the differential clunk for awhile so I ordered the new differential bushing and block from Creative Steel and watched lots of videos on it. I took the car to my dad's garage to do the work and that is where the adventure began. Now between my father, myself and my nephew we have combined about 100 years experience as mechanics, but this one stumped us. We kept going until we solved it. We had to, or I had to get another car to drive home.

Fortunately he has a good lift in the shop so we got the car up in the air, dropped the exhaust, and dropped the rear of the driveshaft. This would be a really tough job without a good lift. Pulling the bolt out of the bushing the front of the differential would drop down some, but not enough. I had to pull the 2 bolts out of the back to get it down enough for good access. I had read about problems with pushing the old bushing out. We ended up cutting most of the way through mine with sharp chisels to the point we could drive it out. We had a couple of sets of bushings and presses which worked to press the new bushing in.

The adventure came when I dropped the back of the driveshaft. All of the discussions and videos that I found showed a rubber coupler at the back. Well the V has a CV joint back there instead. Knocking it loose from the tight fit in the flange of the differential pinion caused the CV to separate and ball bearings started dropping on the floor.

The first thing you can't do is to pack fresh grease in the end of the CV and get the balls to stay in there. You will get 4 of them in there then when you pick up the 5th one, one or two of the balls in the shaft will drop out and roll across the dirty floor. After lots of frustrating attempts I gave up and pulled the driveshaft out.

The next thing you can't do is clamp the driveshaft in a vise with the CV facing up, put the balls in, and put the CV back together. The CV will seem to go back together and you can manage to put it in the car, but it will be locked up and will cause horrible vibration. So we went back the next day, put the car back on the lift, removed everything again, and pulled the CV apart. We tried several times to put the CV back together to function as it should but finding that the balls weren't going properly into the grooves. During one of the attempts to put it back together I noticed that the grooves in the outer CV piece were angled not straight as you would expect for a normal CV. That's why the outer piece won't slide over the 6 balls.

After more frustrating attempts my dad popped the dust cover off of the end of the CV so we could see what the problem is while trying to realign everything. Then we could easily see that the balls wouldn't line up to start into the grooves. We figured they had to assemble the CV somehow at the factory and we noticed a small snap ring in there holding the inner piece of the CV onto the shaft. We removed the snap ring and drove off the inner CV with ball cage still on it. Now with the 3 pieces separated you can put the inner in the outer in your hands, tilt the ball cage and stick in a ball. Tilt it another way and stick in another ball. We managed to get all 6 balls in there, drove the spline back on the driveshaft, and put the lock ring on.

Then we noticed that the CV was totally locked and wouldn't swivel in any direction. The angled grooves in the outer piece was causing it to bind up on the balls when it tried to move. I never looked carefully at the inner piece but it seemed that the grooves were straight and not angled so it shouldn't have mattered which way it went. Figuring it crazy to put sloping grooves in a CV, but figuring that it still had to work somehow, I popped all of the balls out, rotated the inner 1/6 turn and put the balls back in. This time the CV would operate freely. We drove it back on the splines and put everything back together. As soon as we put the CV parts back on the end of the driveshaft I put a piece of wire through one of the bolt holes and twisted it on the outside to hold everything together just in case. Once I started one of the bolts in the pinion flange I cut the wire and pulled it out.

Like I said I had done a lot of research before tackling this job, and didn't find anything about indexing the driveshaft so I didn't make any marks anywhere. There were white marks on the driveshaft and on the CV dist cover but not on the actual inner piece of the CV. And after total disassembly of the CV none of those parts would have lined up again anyway. I had taken a break during our adventure and did some internet searching to find out if anyone revealed how to put the CV back together. Now I'm finding a lot of discussion about bad carrier bearings, blown CVs, etc. and it appears that several people were forced into replacing the entire driveshaft. There was also discussion of indexing the driveshaft. So here is a question- if you buy a new driveshaft how do you index it? It has never seen your car before and you have no clue how to put it in there.

When we put the car on the lift and up in the air the second time I was in the car so I could start it and run it in gear. My dad could see that the rear connection was vibrating, not the carrier or the rubber flex at the transmission. Maybe I just got lucky with reconnecting the driveshaft at the front. We had no clue about indexing of the pinion connection since the parts were so mixed around so we just put it together randomly. I test drove the car up to the local freeway speed limit of 75 and didn't detect any vibration at any speed so maybe I'm lucky again. I drove it 100 miles home today and no vibrations but more importantly no clunks when you shift.
 
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