Hi. I am new to this group. I am hoping someone may help me here because i am at my wits end. I changed both half shafts on our car this weekend. Now i have a bad shake that feels like it is side to side under acceleration, especially between 55 and 100 km/h. And seems to go away when you are at a constant speed. I had problems with the drivers side because of the c clip. The inner part of the shaft seems to have a lot of movement but can not get it to go in any more. The passenger side was also fun. I had to undo the rear mount so i could pull the half shaft out with the bracket the bearing slides in because it was seized in there. There was no shake at all to the car before doing this. Is it something i did wrong? Or is it a possible bad half shaft? I hope some one here has had this problem or knows some one who has and to fix this. Oh by the way it has the 2.2 with overdrive tranny. It seems to shift smooth and does not clunk when moving it through the gears. I also tried rotating my tires and it did nothing. Thanks. Peter

 

First, don't feel badly that you spent so much time doing a fix then find that dispite your best efforts it turned out badly - been there, done that.

I can't say what's wrong but have a couple of questions to clarify. You say you had problems with the c-clip on the drivers side. Problems pullingthe axle outor re-installing it? Does the movement seem to show movement in and out of the transmission case where the splined shaft goes inor at theCV joint? If you grab the inner part of the shaft and push/pull do you get a lot of movement? There should be hardly any. When you re-installed the axle how did you getit in against the resistance of the c-clip, did you just push it inby hand? Did you have the c-clip facing down?

I had the same problem with the center bearing on the passenger side as well. Mine was also seized in the mounting bracket. It took me about 2 hours of trying with different prys and a lot of sweat and PB Blaster to get it free. I put a good amount of anti-seize on it before re-installation and swore at the previous guy who didn't use anti-seize. How did you finally get the old shaft out of the bearing and the bearing out of the bracket? Have you made sure the large c-clip is installed properly to hold the bearing in the carrier. When I did my final inspection I found the clip not fully in the groove and it took a bit of care to get it in just right.

FWD cars tend to pull to one side, from memory it's thepassenger side. Maybe that side-to-side shake is a clueabout one shaft not in the differential fully and one wheel isdoing most of the driving as the shake goes away at constant speed.

 

Hi. First off i would like to thank you for taking the time to reply. Ok. Yes there is alot of play from the grabbing the inner part of the joint were it goes into the tranny. There is movement in and out and up and down. I never payed attention to how the clip was when i installed it. I had problems removing it and putting it in, or should i say it was not very easy. Now that ya mention the pulling. It does have a tendance to pull to the right now. It was very tough struggle to get the shaft to go in. As for the passenger side i had to undo the bearing bracket and pull the shaft all in one and tap and sweat and curse to get the bearing to finally slide out. I am pretty sure i have the metal clip in properly at the bearing as you mentioned. So it looks like i may not have the drivers side axle all the way in. I mean i even whent out the next day and removed the shaft and tryed to reinstll it with the same fight and hassel. And I still have the movement at the shaft end were it goes in the tranny. Thank you Peter

 

The DS axle should have snapped out and snapped in as you forced the c-clip out of the grove in the tranmission. If it didn't snap back in andit hasmovement,then it's not in correctly. How did you get it back in? I had to put the axle in the hub and use the suspension and hub as extra weight to get it back in.

I would take out the DS axle and inspect the c-clip. Then try to re-install with c-clip facing down.