wheel bearing & stuff

[edudley@mailbox.syr.edu (Eliot W Dudley)]

This is a report of my experience replacing rear running gear 
components on my quattro.

The specimen is an 86 4000q, approx 140,000 miles. (Yeah one of
these days I'll fix that little gear.)  The maladies included
wheel bearing rumble (which in my experience doesn't fail 
with any drama, just gets louder and louder), and sloppy 
ball joints and tierod ends (spurstang on the German label, neat
word).  

The first bad news was the prices: $400 for the ball joints and the 
tierod ends, $70 for the bearing.  I bought my first 100LS for $400.
The next was that everything looked like artifacts from a Jaques
Cousteau expedition, owing to six winters of salt.

Suprisingly the tapered shaft stuff came off easily.  A buddy had
suggested pounding sideways backed up with a heavy hammer on the
castings where the tapered shaft goes through, and it worked great.
I ended up pounding from two sides with two three pound hammers and
they all popped right off.  I think they cooperated because they
knew there was a torch and a pickle fork waiting in the wings.

The book showed a nice home-made looking puller for yanking the 
balljoints from their recesses, but since they were shot I just went
ahead and pryed them out with a chisel.  So I was all set to put that
part of the job back together.

But the wheel bearing, ugh.  The caliper mounts were located by 8mm 
inverted hex head capscrews.  They weren't about to budge and heating 
was required.  Likewise with the stub axel retaining nut, I don't know
how you'd get one off without an air impact wrench and a torch.  Then
again maybe if you had a helper stand on the brakes while you worked
the breaker bar, that would probably work.  Now having removed the 
strut assembly, the trick was to press out the stub axel.  The book 
said this required desroying the bearing.  Sure enough, when you get 
enough pressure on it the bearing would rather break apart than would 
the stub axel slide out of the inner race.  I don't know how you would 
do this without a press.  Now the outer race is exposed, located by a 
snap ring.  At least I assumed there would be a snap ring, and after 
some scraping, there it was, rusted into place.  After some penetrating 
oil and a little heat I managed to get one end of it to wiggle, and as 
with the first drop from a thawing pipe the rest was just a matter of 
time, like about a half an hour.  Likewise for the snap ring on the 
other side, whose removal seemed necessary to present a good shoulder 
for pressing the outer race out.

Now all that was left was the inner race, which is snug to the back
side of the rotor mounting flange.  They had machined two flats to
provide about 0.040" shoulder for pulling the race.  Such a puller
was beyond my imagination, let alone grasp, so I resorted to bravery
and mediocre skill to cut the race from the shaft with the torch.
And that was it, throw it back together, allign it, and I had a quiet,
great handling car again.

The upshot of this all I suppose is that I don't think it was doable
without a press, and without a torch I don't think I could have gotten
the strut assembly off in order to take it to someone who had a press.
The good news is you can save enough in one Saturday to buy yourself
a good little torch.

Cheers,

   Eliot

Eliot W. Dudley                       
3388 State Rt 370  
Cato, New York  13033
315 626 2878
edudley@mailbox.syr.edu