[s-cars] Creeeeak, creeeeeak, creeeeeeak -Tired of those noisy rear link joints?

[Fred Munro]

	Well, after 6 months one of my newly replaced rear upper link outer heim
joints started singing that old familiar tune. My past approach was to stick
a grease needle through the seal and pump it full of grease. This works, but
eventually the seals are full of needle holes. This time I decided on a
different approach.
	The ideal fix would be to drill the outer joint for a grease fitting, but
there is not a lot of metal there and I've been kind of leery about drilling
a hole large enough to take even a small grease fitting in case it weakened
the joint. I took a micrometer to my grease needle and picked a drill 0.002"
smaller (No.51 in my case). I drilled a hole through the top of the joint's
outer housing and then drilled a larger hole just long enough to make a
couple threads for a (very short) stainless 6-32 machine screw to seal the
hole.
	Inserted the needle, pumped grease until it came out of the seals, and
inserted the sealing screw to keep the grease from coming back out of the
hole. Ah, blessed silence. Wait, what's that pool of oil under the car -
arghh, the left side diff seal is leaking.....
	Did discover a few things about these joints. The OEM joint has a heavy
plastic insert between the inner bushing and the outer joint case. The
cheaper aftermarket replacements I bought are metal on metal - no plastic
insert. Maybe that's why they started squeaking in 6 months and it took the
OEM joints 9 years. Maybe there is a reason the OEM joints are more
expensive....

Fred Munro
'94 S4