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October 8, 2019

Inner Axles

At this point, the rear drive train was complete on the GT6, except for the inner axles.  There was a reason for that, which I'll get to shortly, but it turns out that doing the inner axles last is not a bad way to do it.

I was pretty certain that these axles had never been serviced.  They looked to be in OK shape...




...and one of them was.  The other, not so much.  On pressing out the U joint cups, three of them basically fell apart in pieces.




This led me to look at the yoke on the shaft side.




The U joint had obviously been flopping around in that joint for a while.  I can't really blame some faceless OP, since I was the last one to drive the car, and it was a daily driver for at least a couple of years.  In my defense I think I was a twenty-something, in college, with no time, no money, few tools, and nowhere to work on a car.  A clunk in the back of my car wasn't a high priority item.  Well, now there was no excuse, It was time to set it right.

Though I can imagine some ways that the damage to the yoke might be fixed, I preferred to just get another axle.  I don't believe these are available new any more, but used ones are not hard to find.  I bought one on Ebay.  I decided to go ahead and install the rest of the suspension while I waited for the axle, and that's why the axles went in last.

When the axle arrived, it looked to me like the ears of the yoke were splayed a little.  Measurement showed that I was rignt--they were almost 0.100" farther apart than my other yokes.




Well, this was disappointing and frustrating.  I didn't want to delay the project any more, so I decided to try to fix it.  It was a pretty simple matter to press the ears back to the proper alignment, but the risk there is that the bores could end up non-colinear.  After the press work, I made a test bar to check bore alignment. I was relieved to see that the bar slipped nicely through both ears of the yoke.  This also indicates that the bores are perpendicular to the shaft.




With that little side track out of the way, I fiished cleaning up the axles and flanges,




...gave them a nice powder coat,




and popped in new U joints.




One small fly in the ointment was that the long grease zerk fittings that came with the U joints didn't work because they fouled the shaft yoke.




I found some shorter zerks, which worked fine, except then a strandard grease gun tip would not reach them.




But this little push-type grease gun works fine.




So, finally, ready to go. Original hardware, except for the lock nuts, was re-plated.  




I thought it might be easier to do the install with the chassis on the floor to prvide some load.  Getting it off the rotisserie was a small production.




Getting the axles in place was pretty easy, but I had to disconect both vertical links from the spring.




In fact, it was even easier if I removed the spring entirely.




Then, after both axles were secured in place, connected the spring eyes to the vertical links.  This of course left the spring about four or five inches above its differential mounting pad.




A couple of ratchet straps pulled the spring down far enough to get nuts on the fastening studs.



 
The "Official" way to do this is to leave the spring attached to the differential, and use a lever tool to lift up the end of the spring to attach to the vertical link.  Without the weight of the body though, the chassis would just lift off the ground before the spring deflected enough.

In this unloaded state, the suspension is biased very low, to the point where the inner axles are resting on the frame.  I inserted a thick rubber pad on each side between the axle and the frame, both to protect the paint, and to raise the suspension a little so the brake flex hoses weren't so stretched.




Rear suspension and drive train are done!




I was sort of fearful of this project.  I had read that getting the vertical links to mate to the spring could be a bear. In the end, it wasn't that bad.

This part of the project came to around $100, for the new U joints, and the used axle.

Comments to Ed at elhollin1@yahoo.com

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