Gas, tires, oil.

The front end on my wife’s ‘82 diesel 4x4 suburban needed some work. The brake pads are good, but one rotor is really grooved. The axle shaft on one side needs a new u-joint also. And, probably, bearings, seals and ball joints wouldn’t be a bad idea. Unfortunatly, its got a wimpy 10 bolt axle and I hate to put any money in it. So as part of the deal where I got the 6 lug 14 bolt for the rear, I also got a dana 44 front. Now the dana 44 isn’t really much stronger, but this one had new brakes, ball joints and a detroit locker. It also need an axle u-joint, so my plan was to put bearings and seals in the axle and then just do a swap one weekend. First I pulled off the locking hubs by removing the allen screws.

Then you remove the snap rings.

And pull out the splined insert.

The bearing locknuts take a special socket (sometimes called a cold steel chisel).

The hub and rotor can then be slid off (there’s 2 bearing locknuts and washer between them). Six nuts hold on the spindle and brake backing plate.

You can then pull the axle shafts. Unfortunatly, the needle bearing has gone bad chewed up the surface on the outer axle shaft (you can see the metal shavings on seal). I can steal the outer shaft from the 10 axle though (the inner has different splines)

This tool is made to pull nails that have their heads below the surface of the wood, but it also makes a great seal remover.

Below you can see that this axle has had a hard life, it looks like both bearing have spun at some time.

And check out those chisel marks in the bearing locknut. I think I will try to either find some other spindles or use the one off the current 10 bolt. That would mean I couldn’t have the axle ready to just swap, but it’s still should be doable in a week end (as long as nothing else goes wrong).