The Right Tool

At the end of my last post all that was standing between me an the removal of the axle shaft was a rather large circlip. I had probably wasted about 45 minutes trying to extract it using a cheap set of circlip pliers. I am now the proud owner of  a better pair of circlip pliers - namely the Knipex 44 11 J3 (pictured below).

 It turns out these were the right tool for the job. Extracting the problematic circlip took all of fifteen seconds (and ten of those were spent getting myself into the correct position). Here is the the proof...

Next time I'll be reporting on whether or not the axle shaft could be machined for a reasonable amount of money or whether I needed to splash out for a new one.

Hitting Rewind

After many months of sitting on my thumbs I finally did some more work on the Beetle. At the time of the last posting I had failed to fit the brake drum and had decided to either replace the axle shaft (or have the existing one machined).

So axle shaft removal was the order of the day. My worry was that the wheel bearing I had previously hammered into place would be impossible to remove. I also wanted to avoid damaging the new wheel bearing (see Doing the Unstuck). Therefore the plan was to use the puller on the axle tube to remove the bearing.

The first task was to remove the three bolts that held the axle tube to the spring plate. The top two bolts came off relatively easily. However the lower bolt would not move at all. In the end I had to resort to the hack saw.

Next there are six bolts which hold the suspension tube to the gearbox. All six loosened with ease but three of them were taking their stud with them. Of course "sods law" applied and so the lowest bolt was one of these and the stud fouled the lower chassis leg which meant it could not be removed. The fix for this was to put the jack under the gearbox, remove the two massive bolts that held it in place and carefully raise the gearbox by about 1cm. Once this had been done the lowest stud had just enough room to be removed. I then spend 15 mins removing the three problematic bolts from their studs (this is done by tightening two bolts together on the stud and then using that and a couple of spanners to loosen the offending bolt) before cleaning the studs and screwing them back into the gearbox.

Next, the bearing housing and brake back plate were removed - leaving the outer spacer and bearing visible. The puller was then used (behind the bearing housing) to draw the suspension tube away from the gearbox complete with bearing and both inner and outer spacers. Once it had been drawn a few inches everything was loose enough to remove by hand.

The image above shows the suspension tube in situ after the bearing and spacers had been removed. Here's a shot of the removed suspension tube:

This is how things look after the suspension tube had been removed - only the axle shaft remains:

The final task was to remove the axle shaft which was "only" held in place by a large circlip. It can be seen more clearly in the next picture. It's a bit of a monster and I did not have a pair of pliers that were up to the job. I purchased a cheap 10" circlip plier set (Clarke CHT686) but they were not strong enough and warped under the load (they did bounce back to the correct shape though - so they may well come in handy for other, less strenuous, jobs later). Anyway, here's a picture of my current nemesis...