I have a 97 legacy wagon with a bad u-joint on the rear wheel drive shaft. Its the front u joint that is bad. I removed it then found out that they are a non service item.. surely there is a cross reference for a u-joint so I dont have to replace the whole assembly but only replacing the u-joint. Anybody know which u-joint fits in there? thanks for your time

The U-joints are replaceable, they come from a company called Rockford, easiest availibility NAPA.

They can be trickey to replace though. There are two things to consider: 1) the driveshaft is a balanced assembly, you must mark the segments so it can be assembled in the same relationship as it came in, or be prepared to pay to balance, 2) the yokes are, well, weak, they will not stand a lot of pounding, or they will collapse/bend.

 

What I do is use a cutter disk in a grinder to slice out the center of the old joint (after marking the driveshaft and yokes so I can re-assemble it the way it was), then I push the caps towards the center with a socket and a "C" clamp, then I clean up the holes (where your new caps will go) with a Dremel tool (mini grinder), then I carefully re-assemble the driveshaft using a "C" clamp, being real careful not to distort the trunions.

 

http://www.rockforddriveline.com/replacem.htm

a machine shop will install all three in an entire driveshaft for $100 and that's in an expensive part of the country, so might be able to get it done elsewhere cheap. that's for all 3, cheaper for just one. a driveshaft/driveline shop with lots of off road experience might be better set up, random machine shops may or may not want to mess with it.

 

if you do it yourself, be careful cutting, it's easy to nick the yoke depending what kind of tool you use. and it would be best to talk to any jeep guy or someone that knows how u-joints work, has done some work with them before. there's some trickery in persuading the yoke and end caps to seat properly and get the ujoint feeling nice and smooth when it's done, particularly on a custom install like this.

 

you might be able to find more information in the older generation forum as the older driveshafts are nearly identical in principle, but they fail far more often because they're older and have more miles. so there's more experience there and i know it's been covered before. but....previous poster pretty well covered everything.