hankraymond wrote:kurtbob wrote:hankraymond wrote:Well, I borrowed this tool
http://www.stockwiseauto.com/product_in ... QgodegUAjg from my friend Charlie's shop and yanked as hard as I could on the slide hammer but nothing happened. I like the look of that axle popper tool. Kind of like a ball joint separating tool That looks like it would work. Goolsbey's tool looks like it would work too. Charlie is going to come over tomorrow and see if he has any tricks. He told me he got an axle out once by wrapping it with a chain, tying the chain to the trailer hitch of another car and driving away to yank it out with the chain. That won't work here of course, but maybe we'll figure out something. All I want to do is service the CV joint so I may just end up pulling the boot off, shoving some grease in there and trying to seal the boot back up to the tulip. But there's not much room to get a crimper tool in there to tighten up the CV boot clamp.
Why does your CV joint need serviced? Do you lose a lot of grease out of the boot, or is the boot torn? Otherwise, it's best to leave it alone.
I just figured that pulling the axles and greasing the CV joints was part of the yearly off-season maintenance that I should do every year. Isn't that something most people do in the break between racing seasons? Isn't that just standard yearly maintenance?
I'm not sure what others do, but the grease in the CV joints is meant to be permanent. If a boot gets torn, then contamination through the split can do major damage. In that case, the whole joint must be torn apart, cleaned and inspected before regreasing.
Adding more grease than is necessary can actually cause some problems. I used to be an engineer at a CV axle manufacturing plant; we used a set amount of grease during the assembly of each joint.