It's enough to make you miss the old reliable driveshaft lol. It's a shame "progress" isn't better then the old stuff. And then lets make a part that's known to fail really hard and expensive to repair.

 

Are you sure you want to be working under that 'lift' system with all its 'additions'????

 

Yup. It's been solid. It's arching where I have the jack stands and the trays under the axel are giant 1/4" plate steel that's designed for a pair of bottle jacks to lift a car by the axels. There are two that slide up and down. The lift is movable, when you lower it all the way twirh the casters snapped on, the posts lift up in the air and you can wheel it anywhere.

My grandpa had it built when he saw a booth at barret jackson Scottsdale back in 2000/2001. It's a nice little lift. We've had 3/4 and 1 ton trucks on here many times and they barely fit😆 but this car is light as a feather for it. Lol.

 

First thing this morning. Got it down. We don't have a tranny stand back so we put a motor cycle lift on the back jacking trays and put 2x6 so it's not metal to metal. So strapped to that and some hammock straps under just in case it wants to tilt in. But it's out and stripping it apart to see the damage! Lol

Also the rear muffler where there's two bolts that bolt the two mufflers side by side to each other, one muffler the bracket broke. So I'm also welding that back on today when I put it back up. That explains the tinging sound that I kept hearing at the back every time the car was running. My old GTO had that issue but it was a broken baffle inside the muffler. And so I was afraid that's what it was with here too but nope it was just that broken bracket so it was rattling around.




The damn downpipes are all off with the nuts, but the studs are solid And I can't loosen them and so the downpipes are stuck between the studs and the aframe brackets. So they're loose and move around which helps but I wish they were gone. The torque tube kept getting stuck on those. If I could have them gone without doing something like lifting the engine which would take on bolting it and everything else it would be a lot easier to drop the torque tube.

 

I was running Bluetooth couplers! The only thing driving my car was the bolts hitting each other!

 

can you tell if there is any damage to the shaft ? being bent or out of balance?

 

Following the manual there was no way I could do this without dropping the brakes, I mean disconnecting the brakes. We tried to leave the brakes connected, and tried pulling them out of all of them outs so they had a little bit more stretch and give and being that they're all plastic it actually did have some stretch and give, but I didn't want to press my luck too much. And after a while we couldn't pull it and it was very obvious it was due to the brake lines. So we had to disconnect the brake lines the one at the coupler in the pictures from the tutorial, and then the second brake line is an l that bends and goes right next to that on that driver side wheel. I did have to disconnect them both. So I just have to bleed them. But at 70,000 mi it's good to go ahead and flush all the fluid out. Because brake fluid is hydrophallic, and so it absorbs moisture and actually changes the chemical composition becomes very copper heavy. So I am doing a complete flush

 

Thankfully the shaft itself is perfect. Since there was no coupler and it was literally the three bolts sticking out one side and three bolts sticking out the other from the knuckle and that's all that was making me engine connect to the transmission which is got to be a massive amount of torque on it, I was expecting those bolts to be bent and everything else. But they were a massive pain to remove. Due to the copious amounts of dried locked height all over the bolts. But took a torch to around the areas first helped out a ton. Had someone with a basset breaker bar wedge between two of the bolts in a vise and then I had a two and a half foot half inch breaker bar with a t55 torx head. And we were able to get all the bolts off. The new bolts that I got from tick performance since I wasn't sure what the damage would be on those existing bolts not knowing how bad the coupler was, I spent the extra $35 for all new bolts. But they are a hex head versus a torx head. I prefer the torx head over hex.

But other than that, the drive shaft and front and back parts that have the bearings and all are perfect. Also a trick for anybody who doesn't know, if you ever have rubber gooey stuff like even label stickiness left over, asphalt tar if you've ever done roofing and you get that stuff all over you or working on your inside door and you have the butyl tape that holds the plastic vapor barriers on, if you get any of that asphalt rubber that kind of stuff on you, WD-40 melts it off. Any WD-40 just spray it and you will see it all just melt right off of you even your parts. So I spread the drive shaft portion of it with WD-40 and then a slide a rag down the side, And she looks good as new with a manufacturing date of 7-15-2015 down the side of the drive shaft portion

 

And now at 8:30 at night on day two it is done. This thing sounds like brand new there's no more rattling tinging thudding grinding squealing It is silent and smooth. That torque shaft was so bad to where it had zero rubber cushing left and the second one was just about to go to. Presfit all new bearings And she's running perfect again

 

Good job, you started after me and finished before me

 

Lol. I was in a rush because it's my daily driver and the hoa wouldn't really like a car up on a lift taken apart for a long time lol. The only part that we had issues with was getting the cradle back up. It sucked because no matter how much we pulled the rear cradle and transaxle back trying to remove the torque tube it was always just a half inch away constantly but then whenever we put the new rebuilt back up, it was like we had a mile of room in the front and the back. And so once we bolt it up the torque tube to the engine got everything lined up, it went in really smooth. But then the rear cradle the locating pins were lining up but then it was almost binding as we're trying to lift the rear cradle up to meet flat to the chassis. But halfway up the locating pens would bind up and then we just start lifting up the whole car as a whole.

But we ended up doing was I had a foot jack It's basically like a long pole with a screw and in a pad at the top with a foot pedal in the bottom and so you screw up the pad up against the bottom of the transmission or wherever and the foot pad when you push down on it it lifts up whatever object by an inch or two. And it really helps to tight situation especially whenever you're putting in a transmission or something cuz when you have to have the angles just right to get everything in. So I use that to get all of the cradle bolts started And I got them up about about 3/4 of an inch of the threads in and then we leveled it out by screwing in the back ones until there was about an inch of space between the cradle and the body and did that all the way around That way we knew the cradle was level with the car and then we just turned a couple more on each bolt and just slowly raised it up and it slid right into place. That was the biggest hurdle.

Other than that everything else just snap back into place all the harness brake lines training cooler lines all the nuts and bolts that hold everything on put on the rear bumper bled the brakes but the wheels on and done. I never want to do that job again

 

Many congrats on a job well done ! And thanks for keeping us posted !