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Changing Both Axles, Any Tips or Advice?

rexxdoggy

Hard-core CEG'er
Joined
Jul 14, 2007
Messages
3,239
Location
Crestview, Florida
So, it looks to me that I'll be swapping in brand new axles from GCK. And I was wondering how hard of a job that is, how much time it takes, and what to look out for when doing them yourself. I don't want a shop to do it because of, well, the labor costs, but I also have a lot of friends who work on cars just in case if I'm not knowledge worthy enough to do it myself.

So if you have any tips or advice on doing the axles, please feel free to share your thoughts!

Thanks!
Mike
 
for both sides you need to take the hub off the control arm/ball joint. you will need to disconnect the sway bar end links too. then you can press/hammer the axle out of the hub. the passanger side you can just knock off the intermedite shaft. the drivers side you will need to drain the transmission. make sure it fully seats when installing the new axle.
 
go to autozone and rent the slide hammer and FWD axle puller adapter. a few good hits with it and the axles pop right out. other than that, you will have to remove the ball joint and tie rod ends from the knuckle, which can be a PITA sometimes. its really pretty straight forward though.
 
Okay. So I've done a whole knuckle/hub assemble swap, so basically, kinda the same steps, If it's like that easy, then I'm gonna probably tackle it myself, which shouldn't take too long.
 
i just R&Red my drivers axle yesterday. including swapping on a new inner CV boot, it took about an hour. I actually had the axle out in about 15 minutes and install took about the same.

disconnect the sway bar endlink from the strut, remove the tie rod end, remove the knuckle from the ball joint, loosen the nut for the strut in the engine bay (dont remove, just loosen, unless you have taken the caliper off and are going to remove the whole strut/knuckle assembly), remove the axle nut (may want to do with the car still on the ground if you dont have an impact gun), punch out the axle from the knuckle, using slide hammer with cv axle adapter pull the axle from the trans (or the intermediate shaft on the passenger side).
 
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