I wanted to try to break the back of the work on the rear of the car. This meant that the next job was to install the driveshafts. Of course this actually meant one of the most messy jobs on the car, packing the CV’s with grease! I had already done the inner joints, well they actually came greased up, but I had checked them over and squirted in some more grease for good luck. You can overfill them, but hopefully they will be fine! The outer joints however come dry but with a small tube of grease to pack them with. After about half a second with the tube thing I threw it in the bin, and reverted to the CV grease from GKN Porsche shafts. I am sure there is no difference but it come is a sachet and seemed much easier to direct!
Anyway, first up was to gently poke a shaft into the CV to help move it all around and work the grease into the joint.
This is a horribly messy job and I seriously advise you to wear some disposable gloves. Some CV greases, NEO, a really very good, so much so that you cant actually get them off, which is a good thing for CV’s, but bad to hands and clothes! Anyway, after working the grease into the joint you end up with a mess like below. I then removed the shaft and squirted some more into the back of the CV, a little more into the front of the CV for good luck and pushed the shaft back in and the boot over the lot.
This ended up with the much more satisfyingly clean arrangement below. Although be warned of those damn boot clips, They are very thin lengths of steel and bloody sharp!
Getting the shaft into the inner CV was a little bit of a struggle, as you need three hands to hold everything, but I eventually got it to line up and push in over the circlip.
The left hand side was exactly the same, apart from the shaft length obviously. As the output drive for the bike is on the left hand side of the engine, the whole diff assembly is pucked over to the left and the shafts are different lengths. Some manufacturers angle the engine to move the diff into the centre of the car, but then the CV’s are constantly running at an angle, which in my mind has to sap a bit of power, but more importantly wear the CV’s out faster. I am told this reduces the torque reaction as obviously you can simplify the shaft to a spring and the shorter shaft is stiffer than the longer shaft, but in all honesty I cant see this having much of an effect. Maybe though I will be proved wrong.
Tags: Differential
