CNY_Dave

I wish someone near me was the type to swap the knuckle- I could get it from them cheap, put in a new bearing, then swap in the freshly-bearing'ed knuckle in about an hour! Dave

Hmmm, did the front diff lose some fluid?

If anyone is interested in how this (usually) works- The motor gets +12V all the time, and runs whenever the other side of the motor is grounded. The park mechanism is usually a disk/brush assembly under the output shaft that grounds the motor except when it is in the 'park' position. Intermittent wipers usually just give a short grounding to the on/off switch wire and relies on the park switch to carry the wipers through an entire wipe. The park switch could also be a more traditional switch that gets pressed/released by a cam on the output shaft. Sometimes the grounding for the park switch is a separate wire that comes out of the motor and gets bolted under one of the mounting bolts. If this wire gets broken or the mounting bolt loosens, corrodes, etc. the motor is fine and you just need to fix the connection to ground. Dave

Yes, you remove the lower castle nut and press the ball joint tapered stud out of the lower control arm- the ball-joint stays with the knuckle. I was afraid it wouldn't be up to the job, but it works great (so far). Good grease on the threads and where the bolt hits the pressing-arm help a lot. Dave

My cheap harbor-freight ball-joint removal tool is 2 for 2, no messing with the pinch bolt. Have used it at 75k miles and 175k miles in the salt belt. Dave

I could build a tool to do it, but a) would the axle slide far enough into the inner joint and what would it get you? Dave

That is some hard stuff... better use the good parting bit!

ATF & acetone is good too. For guns add a few more ingrediants and make "Ed's Red"

Those poor blighters... can't something be done? dave

You could pull the diff apart and remove the ring gear. You could do that and remove the rear axles except for the end CV joints (which hold the wheel bearings together). You could remove the driveshaft to the rear diff if you figure a way to seal it (if you can't just do what's mentioned in the previous post) 'Easiest' way to seal it would be to just seal the hole the driveshaft comes out of. If you pull the driveshaft and there's nothing sticking out you could pull the seal and JB-weld a disc of metal where the seal goes, or do the same for a metal plate that covers the opening. If some shaft sticks out you'd have to pull the tail housing and remove that shaft somehow. Of course if the driveshaft also engages a bearing and it supports the output shaft, that'd be a bit more difficult. If you pulled the tail housing off you could gut everything that transfers power to the driveshaft and just leave it and the entire rear diff in place, just remove the rear half-shafts except for the outer CV joints, as mentioned. Dave

Good lord, I hope no one would go under it in either case... It would be much less likely to come off the jack stands with the wheels off, I think. Dave

I had to work hard to figure which front wheel bearing was bad a while back. To me, running it on jackstands is sketchy. If I resorted to doing that, a) I would have someone in the car ready to smack on the brakes at the slightest sign of trouble maybe do it with the wheels off (bonus- you can retract the caliper pistons and move the calipers so there's no brake noise) On mine, I put both fronts up, put it in neutral, wheels on, spun the wheel with my hand and used a mechanics stethoscope* going to the strut spring. * as in, 1/2-inch metal rod held against the spring, thumb over the end, thumb jambed in my ear tight enough to block all sound/air.

If it just starts to hum as you speed up, stays that same tone/pitch, then fades away it's probably a sympathetic vibration. Wheel bearings and carrier bearings and bad diffs change the tone/pitch with vehicle speed. Dave

Thought this was going to be like the peekskill meteor...

Front differential bind? I can see a diff binding if it's pretty much wrecked, but don't see what a fluid change will do to fix it.

Does the hum seem to increase at the same rate as wheel/vehicle-speed, or at about 4x the rate of wheel speed increase? The driveshaft spins 4x as fast as the wheels so the pitch changes radically with vehicle speeds, wheel bearings not so much. A bad U-joint won't hum, but the center carrier bearing can. If it's a VDC car the driveshaft wears quicker as it always sees at least 55% of the power. Dave

Has all the suspension, front and rear, been checked for wear? Loose wheel bearing? All the sway links and bushings? Strut mounts/bearings at the top? I had a brake caliper (of all things) make a noise like this, under certain conditions it would shift position ever so slightly. Dave

The noise you describe is consistent with U-joint failures I've had on other cars. It'll happen eventually to almost any car with a driveshaft. If you can get under the car you can usually see the bad joint of you can grab the shaft to either side of the joint and turn one side one way, the other the other. Also, if there is a lot of red rust around the joint, it's probably bad. Dave

Tape a nudie centerfold under there... they won't even remember to check for the cat!

Howsabout the snap-n-go plow? http://www.oxfordleader.com/Articles-i-2010-09-01-237473.113121_Inventors_create_snow_plow_for_all_vehicles.html The plow buddy? http://www.myplowbuddy.com/

This. Leakdown could be through the regulator, injectors, or the pump. Extended cold start crank could be a lean (pump) or a rich (the other items) condition. Dave

Stone the heretic! (Or make him buy the equal length headers) Dave

I have a bigger case of #1, engine is wet but no drips in the driveway. I also have one head gasket that looks like it has had a wash in penn-central green paint, have never seen it wet, at 170K I'm just closing my eyes and ignoring it. Dave

It doesn't necc need to be a big change in anything, the sensor is very sensitive, it runs on the ragged edge of alarming all the time.

Some folks who have battled the dreaded P0420 code (converter efficiency) have found that an exhaust leak downstream of the second O2 sensor can indeed trigger that particular code. So, it may be an improbable, but it is possible the lack of a muffler could cause a code. Dave