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oh, it's an axle too
Thursday, May 14 2015
Today was significantly warmer than yesterday, which made working outside a pleasure. This morning I jacked up the Subaru's front and put it on stacks of concrete blocks and pieces of wood. (I actually rested it on four totally-separate stacks so that there was zero chance it would fall.) Periodically throughout the day then, I would return to the car and try to remove the nuts holding on the various broken pieces of the front end.
The hardest nut of all to remove was the large 22 millimeter one attaching the broken lower control arm to the car's body. A socket can't be fit over it due to the tightness of the space, so I was forced to use a spanner. But it turns out that I don't have a 22 millimeter spanner; I had to use a 7/8 inch one instead. Still, I didn't have enough room under the car to develop the leverage I needed. Happily, though, the whole thing is held by a small bracket that can be easily removed by backing out two 19 millimeter bolts.
There's a castellated nut holding the lower control arm to the ball joint (at the right front wheel), and I couldn't for the life of me remove the cotter pin securing it. I ended up having to break what I could of it, and fortunately what little remained broke away when I back the nut off its bolt. I was surprised when the control arm didn't then just fall off the bolt, but some subsequent internet research showed me that the fit between them is such a tight one that you normally need a special tool to break them apart. On Youtube, though, some people suggested you could get it off if you just banged it hard enough. Since my old control arm was a broken piece of scrap metal anyway, I hit it once or twice with the hammer side of my woodsplitting maul. That did the trick.
Once I'd removed all the broken stuff, I went to try to get the axle properly connecting with the wheel. For some reason I thought there was just some loosey-goosey connection between them that happened when you lined one thing up correctly with the other. But then it dawned on me that the place where I was attempting this connection was inside the rubber-sealed joint of the axle. That's a constant-velocity joint and there should be little or no lengthening play in it. In mine, the two parts were only being held together by the rubber housing. Clearly, then, the CV joint had broken. That sent me back to my computer to make another online purchase. The Subaru's broken part count from this one incident now stood at three, and the parts cost alone was somewhere near $200.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150514 feedback
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