Well, Abbye and I went out with Dave Blakely and his wife Melissa in the Xterra Racer to get some pictures of it out in Moab. I got to ride in the race truck with Dave, while Abbye drove my X with Melissa riding shotgun.
On the way back, Melissa jumped into the race truck and I drove my X out and then I lost most power and the truck wouldn't drive straight ahead...
Ok...someone tell me what is wrong here:
The rest of the pics are
here: I'm thinking it's leftovers from the rollover a few years back that the repair shop missed, but I'll never know. Thankfully this happened on a trail and not the highway, best guess as to series of events as follows:
Passenger side rear axle bearing race cracks, bearings have play in them and vibrate back and forth and finally the bearing disintegrates and the axle shaft walks out. The splines on the axle were chewed up pretty good (fixed with a grinder of all things) but after they got cleaned up the axle slid right into the 3rd member.
Dave and I made a trip into town in his tow rig to get the parts we needed...except no one in town had the V6 rear axle bearings...only the 4 banger bearings. We called Josh and luckily he was going to stay in Provo for the night, and the parts store had the correct bearing, or so we thought. Josh picks up the bearing and heads back to Moab to meet us, and rolls in around 8:45 PM with the bearing, we all head back to my X. Our plan of action changed several times as we figured out some things about the bearing(s) and so we went to work on the axle shaft and rear hub again only to find out the bearing assembly was the wrong one...just a hair (4mm) too small. So we try to winch and back the X onto Dave's trailer for an hour or two and we're gettin no where, so we decide that since I won't be running at any high speed, we can put the axle shaft back in without doing much more damage, did that backed it onto the trailer, strapped her down and off we went to town to drop it at the UHaul place (this is at 2:00am). Ended up back at the 7 Mile parking area where Josh was kind enough to set up his trailer and let Abbye and I stay in the tent while he slept in his X. About 8:00am Sunday morning, we loaded the race truck on the trailer, headed to town, picked up the UHaul, loaded my X up, had breakfast and started our nice, slow journey back to Denver.
So now I get to decide what to do...repair/replace the axle or move to something more universal (D44, Ford 9, D60, 14 Bolt...) decisions...
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