12/5/2007: Driveshaft Done
Picking up the story of the driveshaft, which I removed 4 years ago!…
I cleaned it up by wire brushing and cleaning with naval jelly. I painted the pices in Eastwood’s “rust encapsulator” and “extreme chassic black”. This new ‘extreme’ paint formulation is supposed to be more durable than their regular chassis paint, but it is very important to spray thin coats, 24 hours apart. If you put too much paint on at once, it will take at least a week to fully dry. I found that one out the hard way..
I installed a new carrier bearing and holder. These are the same as used on a 124, so widely available from any supplier. I got mine up the street at Fun Imported.
Then I went to change out the u-joints and made a mistake. I pressed one of the u-joints too far, and it popped through. I tried to push it back the other way, and managed to put a deep groove into the yoke. Real deep. Like, “ruined driveshaft” deep..
So, after cutting out the u-joint to hide my shame, I took it and my only spare driveshaft to a real driveshaft shop (Overland Driveshaft Service) and asked them to clean up my mess.
The simplest fix was to take the back shaft from my other driveshaft and replace its u-joints, then balance it as an assembly with my original front shaft, since I’d already put the new carrier bearing on it.
I then re-painted the other driveshaft half, and it almost looks like I didn’t screw up:
As you can see, I also replaced the flex disc (“Giubo”) with a new old stock pirelli part, exactly like the one that came in the car. It seems to be of much higher quality than an aftermarket one I had bought from a european supplier some time ago. I decided to not use that one because it had some fine cracks and just looked cheaply made.
I also found a proper set of bolts (3 long ones for the transmission side, and 3 shorter ones for the driveshaft side) on one of my spare transmissions. I cleaned them up and had them, along with the other driveshaft bolts, re-plated in zinc.
Here’s the new carrier bearing, replated bolts, and new u-joint: