The first time I removed an axle nut was for changing the captive rotors on my old Honda. You had to pull the whole knuckle assembly to do this, which is dumb, but it taught me a lot about the suspension, and was one critical step toward being able to change some of the more difficult suspension components.
To remove the knuckle assembly, the axle nut has to be removed. Being fairly new to working on cars, I had put the car up on jack stands and taken the wheel off. I had my dad stomp on the brakes to hold the hub in place while I used a breaker bar with a 3′ cheater pipe to free the nut. This worked, but was not the smart way to do it. Most wheels have a space through which you can access the axle nut, so if you loosen the nut while the wheels are on the ground, the weight of the car helps hold the hub in place, and it’s pretty easy. But I didn’t know this at the time (it takes awhile to starting ‘thinking’ right about how to change things), and ever after the idea was born in my head: “I really want an impact wrench to make taking these off easier!”
I think I eventually wised up and started leaving the wheels on while I did this. I remember changing the axles on my mom’s car and things went really smoothly. But in my head, I still kept thinking that an impact wrench was the best way to get these off, forgetting that it’s actually pretty easy without one, if you do it right.
Lo and behold, last year I finally bought an impact wrench! And it’s glorious. But since I needed to free the axle on my current car to change the control arm and ball joint, I got excited. “I get to use the impact this time!”
So I did. And…it was working pretty hard. Really hard. Too hard. It started slowing down drastically just as it was getting to the end of the axle, and then – my heart stopped – the nut started free-spinning. And would not come off.
I think I’ve shared part of this story before. I was able to text a friend who suggested a cut-off wheel, but I ended up finding a Dremel (basically a smaller version of a cut-off wheel) at a hardware store within walking distance of here. I bought the little metal wheel attachment as well as a tungsten-carbine bit (oh that thing is amazing!) and managed to get the nut off. But the axle was destroyed by the nut at the very beginning of my big project. The first time I used an impact wrench on one. I’ll probably never do that again, even if all the pros on YouTube do it all the time and never have any issues.
I was able to slap an $80 aftermarket axle in and get things going, but my original axle had been OEM and had appeared to be in pretty good condition. O, misfortune! Why hast the universe conspired against me! Well, that’s the beauty of complex systems, get fucked. It’s also why the tools you need increase exponentially the “deeper” into the car you plan to go, because there are more things that can go wrong along the way.
So here’s what happened afterward: I kept the old axle. And it occurred to me that if I bought a junkyard axle, I might be able to replace the housing on the outboard joint that composes the threads for the axle nut. This would allow me to keep my axle alive for a minimum price and some elbow grease. So I ordered a junkyard axle online that appeared to have good threads for $60. You can get them cheaper from junkyards directly, but this car is so widely used that fresh meat in the junkyard is picked clean within a day or two – it’s just not worth the gamble driving 45 minutes North for that crap.
I figured I could just unclamp the boot, remove the joint from the housing, do the same to the junkyard copy, swap those housings, reclamp, and be good to go.
This did not work out so well.
First of all, the grease inside of there is awfully nasty. I’m not afraid to get dirty – I wouldn’t work on my car if I was – but axle grease is a whole new level. It gets everywhere and is nearly impossible to get out of clothes, part of why I have specifically designated clothes for working on the car. There’s no good way to get the axle shaft out of the housing either, as it’s held in place in the joint using a clip deep inside that may or may not be happy with you. I hammered, and hammered, and hammered. I started to fear I might be damaging it. That clip would NOT come free. It started to damage my hammers, and when I was cleaning them off with a paper towel, I took a metal sliver to my thumb and had to pull it out with some tweezers. Was not pleasant.
So I called it quits.
It’s tempting to see those diagrams of the axle and, understanding them, assume mentally that changing stuff inside is easy. Too often, it isn’t. I realized that not only would I have to get this one free, but I’d have to get the other free, too. Moreover, it’s possible neither one of these axles was in great shape, and the inner boot seemed a bit old, which would require it’s own procedure to operate on. With grease everywhere, my patience running thin, metal shavings threatening, and one frustrating POS in the vice, I had to make the call: it just wasn’t worth it. I took the dust shield off the end of the axle so I could put it back on the junkyard axle, pulled the boot back up on the joint housing (so it wouldn’t leak everywhere), then took the whole assembly and dropped it in the trash.
First of all, it isn’t critical, as the aftermarket axle I currently have installed works. It doesn’t have the same balancing that the OEM does, so it has a little bit of a vibration, but it still works. Second of all, I bet that junkyard axle works, too. The boots seem to be in pretty good condition. It has a tad more slop to its joints than my old one did, hence why I wanted to perform the transplantation, but I’d bet it still works just fine, too. Third of all, what is the point of having money if you aren’t going to let it decrease your stress? Yes, I don’t really want to pay $500 for a new OEM axle, but what’s stopping me? This has been the absolute hardest thing about having money: letting go. I spend so much time obsessed whether I’m spending money right or not. Some of this is fun (my yearly Best and Worst Purchases posts are some of my favorites), and it’s definitely worth reflecting on, but fuck me, if you have substantial assets, what the hell do you care about $500 if you need it to keep your car alive and running well? “Stop paying homage to the poverty spirit!” I keep telling myself. It’s a message that I’m having a really hard time accepting. I’m supposed to care! $500 is a lot of money! I can’t just take that on the chin, can I?
And yes, it would have been cool to pull it off, to perform the transplant, to make the old axle happy a gain. It would have been really cool. It was worth a shot. But when I couldn’t even get the shaft out, that was the early warning sign. I keep learning all the time, but I’m not inexperienced getting things to work. Just maybe not in respect to this. But when you get in there and figure out you can’t do it, you have two options: press forward, or turn back. Sometimes pressing forward is worth it, other times it isn’t. And this time, it wasn’t. And honestly, it feels good to draw the line. I like saving money, and I hate when my own mistakes cost me, but it doesn’t really matter in the long run, and sanity is more important than savings. If absolutely nothing else, I learned a lot, and it cost me less than a college class, for what that’s worth. Also, I’m pretty sure I still saved money doing the control arms, ball joints, and engine mounts myself, even after the cost of my mistakes.
When I went to change the control arm and ball joint on the other side of the car, I definitely didn’t use the impact, and that nut came off just fine. Whew!
Some lessons are meant to be learned and left at that.