One of the last things I needed to do before I could look at starting the engine was to refresh the axles and refit them.
I wanted to clean and regrease the CV joints and replace the boots. The boots were looking a bit sad, and the joints themselves seemed really floppy.
Using a small flat-blade screwdriver, I popped the tabs on the metal boot retaining bands and removed them
The outer joints appeared to have been serviced at some point, as the grease was different to the inner joint, and the boots were newer and less perished (although both had a few little pinholes in them). The grease on these ends was quite hard and clumpy.
On the other end, the inner joints had really old, perished boots, and the grease was horrible, smelly, slimy stuff. Nothing like cracking open a boot and releasing the smell of rancid fish.
According to the manual, only the inner joints can be disassembled. The outer joints are not serviceable. I could probably pop the axle out if I hammered on the joint, but without a spare, it wasn’t worth the risk.
With the boot undone, the joint cup just pops out, and the spider slides out and is free.
I wiped as much grease off the joint and out of the cup as I could, and sealed it in the rubbish bin
To remove the boots, I needed to remove the spider. This is held onto the shaft with a retaining clip. Annoyingly its one of the ones that just has tapered ends, not holes for circlip pliers. I managed to pop it off (and not lose it) with circlip pliers and a small flat-blade. It didn’t once become a “Ping-Fuckit”, I’m so proud.
The spider just slides off the splines
With both boots removed, I thoroughly cleaned out the outer CV joint, using brake cleaner, rags and a screwdriver to carefully scoop the grease out
Once cleaned, I dried the joint and then packed it with new Redline CV grease and slipped a new boot on. The cheap Aliexpress CV band tool did the job well. You wind the excess band onto the tool using the handle on the left, and once it’s tight, bend the tool up and over to crease the band (so it won’t just undo) and the handle on the right cuts the band. Remove the tool and hammer over the little retaining tabs. Done.
Rinse and repeat, and you have an axle with nice new boots and new grease. A quick wire bush job gets rid of all the external grease, too.
This is the state of the older-looking inner boots. Very hard and perished. Not cracked through yet, though
I ended up using almost a whole tub of CV grease between the two axles, after packing all the joints and boots
I was sure to clean out the needle bearings on the spiders and run new grease into them
That left me with a pair of nice, clean and fresh axles
With new hub nuts and washers
Fitting them wasn’t too bad. I ended up removing the bolts from the struts and letting the hub hang down. Pop the inner joint into the gearbox, wrangle the outer into the hub and bolt the suspension back together
I took a couple of minutes to replace the outer tie rod ends, too, as the old ones were a bit floppy
I rattled the hub nuts up for now, but I will need to properly torque them to the required 150-260NM (it’s a really broad range in the manual) once I can have a helper hold the hub still with the brakes.
Now that the axles were in place and the gearbox didn’t have gaping holes in the sides, I pumped some nice new GL4 fluid in and capped it off, ready to move onto the next job.