"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." - Marcus Aurelius
Driving home from work Sunday evening, I noticed a nasty shudder in the old Subie when I'd accelerate. The entire driver's side dash would rattle around. The Subie has always been remarkably vibration-free, so something was amiss. Without giving it much more thought, I assumed a CV joint was failing and that it was time to replace the left front axle.
This turned into quite a bit more of a project than I first anticipated.
First off, a public service announcement: Everyone by now probably has a set of Harbor Freight jack stands kicking around in their garage. These ones on the left, they aren't any good. They have been recalled (Item numbers 56371, 61196, and 61197), and Harbor Freight will give you a store credit for them, if you can only remember to take them along when you travel to town. I also no longer trust the ones on the right, which haven't - yet - been recalled.
I would be OK with getting crushed under a Ferrari or a McLaren, but getting crushed under a salvage title Subaru is a fate worse than death. I bought a brand new pair of jack stands from AutoZone, which are probably manufactured in the same Chinese factory as the defective Harbor Freight ones. Hopefully these new ones have better locking devices. They definitely have very cool blue paint!
Step two, after lifting the car. Remove the wheel and soak everything down with WD-40. The nut in the center of the hub will release the front axle, allowing it to slide out to the rear. You also have to swing the hub outward, which means the lower control arm has to come loose.
Hard as I tried, the pin would not budge. I tried to hammer it back and forth to free it up, and pulled on the ends with vice grips until they broke off. Once they broke off, I tried pounding it through from either end with a punch.
Nothing worked, so I finally put a wrench on the nut and sheared the rusty ends of the pin off. This of course boogered up the threads inside the nut, but I hoped that it would still be usable. I drilled out the remains of the cotter pin afterwards, below.
Even with the nut off, the lower control arm did not want to come free from the ball joint, so I had to run to the auto parts store and purchase a pickle fork to separate the two. I also picked up a spare ball joint, because I had a bad feeling about the threads I'd messed up.
Once you separate the lower control arm and remove the nut from the center of the hub, there is enough free play that the hub can swing upwards a bit. This allows the axle to slide out of the hub.
Below: The axle is free on from the hub! Now for the other end.
Below: Underneath the car. The transmission is at the bottom in this picture, and the the axle is coming in from the top of the photo. A roll pin (center) must be punched out of the hole to release the axle from the transmission.
I was unable to pull the roll pin out with vice grips. Space was pretty tight, so I either had to buy a longer needle punch or make one... I ground the point off an old nail and made a long punch, which got the job done.
Before starting, I had purchased a replacement axle. When I got the two axles side by side, I noticed something odd down at the bottom of the picture. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but these don't look the same. The old part certainly doesn't have a toothed wheel for an ABS system on it.
Back to AutoZone I went to exchange the axle for one that would fit in the car. The kid behind the counter informed me that my car has the wrong part in it. I suspect that instead of the Subie having the wrong part, his database has an error.
I returned with this: Much more similar to what came out of the car. The joints on the old part (under the rubber boots) flopped around, and you could feel clunking and play in them. The new ones were tight and a bit stiff to bend, indicating tighter tolerances.
The new axle went in without any problem. The trouble began when I tried to replace the nut on the ball joint that started out with the rusty cotter pin. The nut went on part way, then it cross-threaded and began spinning the bolt.
I tried to find a thread-chaser to clean up the threads among my tools. Nope nothing like a fine thread M10 metric in my box. Likewise the AutoZone store, and at the local Ace hardware store. Good luck finding a mid-size fine-thread metric tap in this town! There was no chance I was going to be able to get the nut back on the ball joint bolt... so as I had suspected, the ball joint had to come out.
"The ball joint had to come out". Simple sentence, ungodly amount of time and trouble.
After trying several techniques to remove it (heat, swearing, hammers), I ended up having to insert the bolt back through the lower control arm and hammer the nut up onto the ball joint bolt (because the threads were shot). Then I welded the nut on, and used a wood-splitting wedge to drive the ball out of its socket. Absolutely unbelievable.
Below, the ball joint (left of center) is halfway out of the socket after hammering a wedge (center) between the lower control arm and the steering knuckle. This was the stuff of nightmares.
In the end, I won the war vs. the axle and the ball joint. The big worry after all this hassle was this: Would the car still shudder and vibrate during acceleration? Would the wheel fall off? Would it still steer?
The car drives and steers as it should and the vibration is no longer there. Amen!
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