Spider gear fun

[grampahol]

So yesterday, a day that will live in infamy I had to replace the rear axel bearings in my truck, by itself no big deal, BUT somewhere along the way the left axel decided to jam up and whilst rotating it a tad the spider gears fell out and THEN i ran out of daylight, it got too cold and dark and today I have to relearn how to do this nonsense all over again after 20+ years of having not done this for a long time.. I'm not feeling too swell about this this morning. At 61 it's no longer much fun laying on the hard concrete doing things upside down. Trust me on this..You WILL get old someday and forever regret not being rich enough to pay some other schmuck to do all this crap for you.. Unless you do manage to hang onto a few bucks.. (I didn't) I could really use a 6 foot long arm today, but I wasn't born that way so..oh well.. Luckily I have another vehicle to run around to get parts, drive around full of regrets and so on, but that doesn't fix the problem at hand.. The sun is just coming up now as I type.. Wish me luck! 

[grampahol]

got em back in place and the pin in and bolted up.. Much easier than I even remotely expected it to be.. Now I just have to put the U pins back in and bolt up the pan.. I should be back on the road within the hour unless something unforeseen went wrong...again. 

[grampahol]

Other than 13 pounds of grease on me and my clothes all is well..

[fredtoast]

(02-25-2021, 08:45 AM)grampahol Wrote: So yesterday, a day that will live in infamy I had to replace the rear axel bearings in my truck, by itself no big deal, 

That is easy for you to say.

I had a broken lug bolt a while back and thought it would be easy to replace.  Ended up having to pull the hub just to get to the back of the flange to replace the bolt.  Still sounds easy to  mechanic, but it took me most of a day.  Just pulling out the pin that locks the hub nut in place was a big job for me.

[grampahol]

I meant to say rear seals..I neglected the bearings so that's coming soon as ebay gets my slide hammer and parts here. I'll have to redo everything I did last week, pull the axles seals and bearings and start all over.. Fun, fun and funner than a barrel of dead monkeys..

[jfkbengals]

(03-03-2021, 11:05 PM)grampahol Wrote: I meant to say rear seals..I neglected the bearings so that's coming soon as ebay gets my slide hammer and parts here. I'll have to redo everything I did last week, pull the axles seals and bearings and start all over.. Fun, fun and funner than a barrel of dead monkeys..

That's always the worst thing to go through in a repair.  The older I get, the less often I do vehicle repairs myself.  But the times that I do, I have gotten more and more to the point of replace everything, including stuff further along.  For example, my parking brakes are inside of my rear rotors ( the rotor is the brake hub).  If the disc has to be replaced, I am replacing the pads, disc, and parking brake shoes and hardware.  Otherwise I end up putting it all back together only to have the parking brake shoes crap out a few weeks later.  Now I'm doing it all over again because I didn't want to go one more step the last time.

[grampahol]

I did get all the tools and replaced the bearings and got it running, but..the bearings I bought were slightly oversized sooooo..Back to the grinding noise. It runs OK and I did drive it to N Carolina and back last week to buy some equipment, but I'm going to do it all over again with different bearings. The replacements have a retainer ring that binds the outer axle flange a bit so I had to pound them in. Luckily I have the slide hammer and the axle pulling adapter. I'm just hoping it hasn't scored the axle flange too much. I don't want to have to replace the actual axles..  Another thing is someone had done this previously so when I pulled the bearings I found a deep gouge in the axle housing. Evidently they pulled the originals with a crow bar or something.. There's always some unwanted surprise in used vehicles somewhere..