After 3 hours I got the axle stub out.


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Posted by Keith in Washington on Monday, October 03, 2005 at 11:49AM :

In Reply to: John Eickhof posted by Keith in Washington on Sunday, October 02, 2005 at 7:16PM :

First of all, Brad in Texas thanks for the call this morning. It is great to get an unexpected call from a forum member offering help.

After 3 hours of "fun" the stub is out. Here is what happened. The axle broke right at the start of the splines. So the stub was well into the side of the diff and could not be grabbed. I turned the diff on its side and banged a couple of times but nothing fell out. Tried a couple of other things no luck. So I decided to center drill the stub so I could either tap it to put a bolt in or use an easy out. When I started drilling it became clear that stub was highly fractured. I got a tap in there and attempted to pull but not luck. The tap also decided to leave its tip in there also. I started drilling again this time the drilling motion actually moved a piece of the stub outward. I grab it with needle nose pliers. This created room and 4 or so pices came out (about 1/2 of the shaft). Each piece was a triangle with each side being about 1/2" long. However there was still more stub below the pieces that came out. Back to drilling. Finally my best bit jammed and broke and started spinning the stub as it was spinning I pulled and the stub came out.

Here is what I found. The shaft was broken at the start of the splines as I said. The end of the shaft was cone shaped and looked a little like an ice cream cone. The next 1/2" of the saft was shattered into little wedges that followed the splines. Each piece had 1 spline on its outer surface. The stub of the shaft was also cone shaped on the end, thus the wedge shaped pieces in the center. The reason why the stub could not cone out was that the section of wedges obviously expanded when it fractured and wedged the stub into place. Drilling out the center relieved the pressure enough to allow the wedges to move inward slightly. The inside of the diff just outboard of the internal splines was actually pitted slightly from the axle shaft exploding. It was obvious why the stub would not move. The internal splines seem to be just fine. I used a magnet to clean out the metal from drilling then flushed the diff and installed it. I will change the gear oil after a 100 miles or so.

Yesterday was the first time that I have ever been able to drain the gear oil from the diff through the lower plug. I guess my cleaning the sludge out a couple of years ago when I put in a new diff was a good idea. The gear oil was actually not dirty at all. Obviously I cleaned it out again even though there was no metal from the broken axle shaft.

The job took longer than expected, as always. Tear down and install of a little over 1/2 hour each plus 3 hours of stub removal time.



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