Buddy of mine has a '70 Superbee. Mostly original car 383 pistol grip bench seat, manual brakes, manual steering, originally Plum Crazy with white stripes that the 2nd owner painted yellow with black stripes. Solid body, nice 20 footer that any of us would be proud to own. Except for tonight.
Years back, we/he put another 8 3/4 chunk in the back with 3.91 suregrip. 489 case. Everything seemed ok, but a little noisy and more vibes coming through with the increase in revs. After a while it seemed like it developed a leak. Thought it was our installation, but the car sees limited miles, so not high on the priority list to tear it apart. Plus, life and money always affect our plans, right? Anyways, figured out earlier this year that the pinion seal was the culprit of the leak and so we looked at options as far as just getting it fixed vs. having someone go through the entire center section. Also determined at the same time that the front u-joint was bad. We figured we should change both joints and re-evaluate the behavior/manners of the 3.91 gears on the road vs. possibly having it changed over to the more highway friendly 3.55. No problem. Should only take an hour or so, right?
Shows up at the house at 2pm. Get the shaft out and confirm his suspicion of recollection of having the rear u-joint be one of those odd 2 size cross joints. The 3.91 chunk that we put in 15 years ago required the odd size joint due to a smaller yoke.
I already knew we probably wouldn't find one in stock.
Take the shaft up to where I work, and press all the joints out. No problems, just like it should. Run down to Napa for the regular front joint (the bad one) and maybe luck out with a new odd sized joint. No luck, but they do have the regular one up front and since that's the really really bad one, we figure we'll try o'reillys on the way back to my work. Oreillys doesn't have it either but the guy goes ahead and orders it in for tomorrow. Kinda pushy guy behind the counter, but ok, we can put it in later when we have the 8 3/4 chunk taken out. Stop by home to make sure we remember which end of the driveshaft has the narrowed end. Simply marking the driveshaft "front" and "rear" seems so simple now, LOL. Duh. Get back to my work and start to put the new joint in the slipe yoke. Problem is, the caps slide into the yoke, like they're a thousanth or two too small. Plus, the clips are not thick enough, meaning the groove they snap into is wider than the clips. The groove is the right width, but the clips are too thin. Assemble the joint and the whole thing moves back and forth in the yoke. Not cool.
Put the old odd sized joint back into the rear of the shaft no problem. Run back to Napa, (dreading talking to some kid that is 15 years younger than I) and ask about this new joint, and he brings out another of the same joints, plus one from another line of product. Found the cheaper joint had the wider clips and the caps did not slide into the yoke by hand like the one we just got. So, yay for that. Exchanged it and it appeared we were golden.
Go back to the house, cause I figure we can put it all back together with what I have at home. Get home and it looks and feels good going back together except I can't get one of the caps all the way in, cause it looks like one of the needles fell. Run back to work (it's now 5:30) and pull it all apart and sure enough one of the needles did fall, but since we were ginger putting it together, the needle was fine. Got it all back together and was walking out to the car when one of the unsecured caps on the back fell off and we lost 1/4 of the needles.
I have a couple of new, but cannibalized joints at home, so I figure we can rob some needles out of one. After all, we have another odd joint showing up tomorrow at O'reillys, right? Get home and get it back together and in the car when I realize I forgot 2 clips. Ungh. No big deal as I wanted to run a tap down the holes in the rear end yoke. Pull it, clip it, was running the tap when I got a mean eyelash or something in my eye. 20 minutes fixing that alone! Get it ALLLLL back together, greased up.....let me tell you about the grease.
With the odd shape joint in the back, you can't get the grease gun fitting in there. When we pulled the shaft to put the 2 clips in, we put the shaft in a vise holding the loose caps on so I could shoot the grease in without the caps coming off.
So, ALLLLL back together, and ready for a drive. Within 10 miles the car seems worse than before and after 15 miles when coming to a stop you can hear the pop/clunk of what sounds like is a loose front u-joint. Got it back home and back up on jackstands and the front joint caps are moving back and forth in the front yoke (just like the first one we got) except all snap rings are in place.
Still trying to figure out what's wrong, but I'm guessing the slip yoke is going to have to be replaced.
It just sucks, for a lot of reasons. Some obvious like the huge amount of time wasted and he's no better off, actually it's worse than when we started. The money wasted is the main one, but now, instead of barely being able to throw some dough at having the 3.91 unit rebuilt, he's looking at possibly (probably) fubarred front yoke and junk front joint. And most driveline shops don't fix stuff for free, so..... Also add in the fact that ideally, he'd replace the rear yoke with a correct or normal size so that a regular joint could be used, but then you have to, or might as well have the chunk checked out and that proverbial snow ball just keeps growing and growing and did I mention the transmission tailshaft bushing and clutch?
There's more, but dang. 2 u-joints, 5+ hours...
Stupid full moon anyway.
