Sunday, September 14, 2014

Halfshaft Woes. User error.

Driving the E21 today and heard a pop then felt the car misbehaving as if the halfshaft had failed.

Luckily I was only a short distance from home. Jacked it up and this is what I see:


Two bolts missing (one of which has left part of itself behind), and of the four remaining, one has snapped and also left remnants in the back of the hub assembly, and two have hammered threads.


My fault for forgetting locktite. Rookie mistake. I filed flat where the outermost thread had pulled out/warped from a couple of the holes, then used my auto center punch to punch the two broken bolt pieces.


Because they broke due to sideways force rather than binding in the hole, I only needed to drill partially into them - once I noticed the drill was starting to turn them clockwise, I simply reversed the drill and put it on a slight angle to bind the bit in the hole; running the drill then wound the remnants out in seconds.


Here you can see two damaged bolts, one OK (thread wise, although it could be a tad bent, looking at it!) and one snapped bolt. One of the "u" clamp/washers was also missing but I've got spares from the last half-shaft.


Off to get more bolts (and locktite this time!)

I'll leave you with this very traction-less zero to one-hundred and something km/h:


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