2007 Toyota Rav4 - Staked Driveshaft U-Joints and other Repairs

hey guys welcome back behind me is the 2007 toyota rav4 this is the one that we did the piston and ring replacement on well the front of the vehicle looks pretty good but we've got some serious problems here at the back so this is the rear differential that's the prop shaft coming back check out this u-joint that's not good yeah it makes a heck of a racket going down the road I'm sure I think what I'll do I'll just take this prop shaft completely out and she can drive it as a front-wheel drive car for a while until we can get parts so the next problem is this is the rear sway bar check out this sway bar link yeah I don't think you're supposed to be able to do that and it's actually broken on both sides a whole sway bar it's just free to go wherever at once so we need to sway bar links well I'd say all the tires need to be replaced but this one is completely spanked I don't know what's going on wheel bearings good there's no play in the suspension thus u-joint has turned into a little bit more than I was I was bargaining for these are staked in so you see right here Holly's got these little little dots around the outside so there's no snap ring holding the the cap of the u-joint in place they just press it in and then a machine deforms the steel of the forging here and that's that's your retainer so unfortunately it's not like the Ford like what JC Smith did not too long ago where it has a snap ring groove and you can you know shim it out and and put a snap ring in it so I looked around there is a company that makes a replacement u-joint for this drive shaft and it has a circlip that goes on the inside to hold the cap in place but what I'm worried about is that this thing is really trashed I mean completely trashed and the whole cap is basically gone on this side so what I'm worried is that the actual ear here of this yoke is worn so badly that if we go to try to press a new cap in there you know it's gonna be hot dog in a hallway so I think what I'm gonna do will just blast us apart with a torch and knock that cap out real quick and then we can see kind of what we're dealing with so I called my local driveline shop that I've worked with before they kind of specialize more in heavy trucks but they'll do stuff like this anyway they don't want to mess with it all they wanted to do is sell me a new Dorman driveshaft for about 900 bucks and then the auto parts store can get me a Rheem and I don't know who does the remand but it's about 500 bucks the replacement u-joint is like $35 so if we can just replace the huge joint we're gonna do that there's nothing else wrong with the rest of the shaft this is our only issue so anyway let's get the torch blasted apart and see what we're dealing with [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so that's the cap the one that was completely worn out see this one's not so bad all right just like I suspected here let me zoom me in whoa too far all right can you guys see you're right there so I don't know if we're gonna get around that well I don't know what to say about that there is still a section of the of the actual bore you know above this worn area that's good so you know realistically we've only lost about I don't know let's say 20% of the contact area but it's 20% of the contact area in the direction that really matters so man I don't know what to say I guess the other thing too is that this is for the rear axle you know in the cars primarily a front-wheel drive vehicle the only time you really get any torque in this prop shaft as if you're you had the differential locked which you know honestly if she does that four or five times a year I'd be surprised yeah there you go so I don't know I'm gonna have to think about it I guess well guys it's been so long since I worked on this Drive she had to can't recall where we left it but I think there's some footage of me cutting one of the u-joints out with a torch and we found out that one of the the yolks here was worn pretty badly and I was trying to figure out what to do with it so here's what I did I bought a whole reman drive shaft this is a Cardone reman unit I sent the old one back as a core before I checked that this one was gonna fit so let's cross our fingers on that and I also bought two new Moog rear sway bar links and a daco serpentine belt now a lot of guys probably be upset because I didn't try to fix that old driveshaft yeah I hear ya and if this was my truck you know or something that I drive every day I probably woulda you know gone in there and welded up the yoke and tried to bore it back out and bought a you know a universal join it from Rockford driveline and shoved it in there and called it a day but this is on my wife's car and she was raised in one of those bizarre families where they you know expect their vehicle to work right all the time and you can imagine that puts a pretty large strain on our marriage so I figured would do the right thing and just buy the Rheem and drive shaft to get it over with and she can go back to four wheeling she's been driving it as a two-wheel peeler for this whole time which I'm not gonna admit how long it's actually been but it's been a while anyway these these vehicles are primarily two-wheel drive anyway so it doesn't really hurt it I also went ahead and had new tires installed so we're not too worried about that anymore and then eventually we're gonna have to replace the shocks and struts they're pretty much pooched but that's beyond what I have time to do today so underneath all I've really done so far is just clean up the driveshaft flanges where it comes out of the transmission and goes into the rear the front ones kind of a bugger to get to so I use this tool here which is an extended length roll lock adapter for my quarter inch die grinder these things are pretty nice I know you can buy them online I may maybe I'll look and see if I can find a link for you guys it's got this little shield on the outside so you don't get yourself twisted up in it and you can reach down into you know weird places pretty handy for like doing thermostats and stuff where you can't really reach it with any other kind of tool all right drive shafts installed I'm gonna torque the bolts to 25 foot-pounds and my lovely assistant will hold the drive shaft from turning while my apprentice demands that the car be lower Hey we'll put it down in a minute kiddo we'll put it down in a minute so here's a comparison of the new Moog versus the old OAM sway bar link you see the moves quite a bit beefier in all dimensions plus it has a grease zerk and what's really nice they gave us a flat right here to hold the thing while we're tightening up this had a little hex here you could use like a hex key of course that generally doesn't work because you would have to use an open end in a box end wrench so anyway yeah nothing to it and I already got this one installed looks pretty good okay the other side is put in I kind of messed up I should have left the nut off this bushing on both sides until I had the nut on the ball joint up here tight on both sides cuz it's too it's too close to the coil spring here to get you know get a tool in there without being able to move the sway bar up and down so it just needs a little bit of grease and that'll be done so another thing I noticed while I was down here this heat shield is loose on the exhaust this is the muffler right here a resonator we're gonna call it anyway it's just corroded through around that nut and washer so I'm sure there's a proper way to fix that you know peel the carpet back and take this nut off and put a larger fender washer on it and all that Jess I'm gonna show you the redneck way to fix it it involves self-tapping sheet metal screws and you don't want to do that if it's in the floor area you know where your feet are but this is up in the hump where the seat sits so even if they poke through the carpet it's not gonna hurt anything I'm using this stay bill Russ stopper I don't know if it's any better or worse than fluid film seems to be pretty much the same formula I don't know if I specifically mentioned it but when you buy the remand drive shaft I'm assuming they change out both yokes because the pattern is quite a bit different but it does come with replaceable new joints in the new drive shaft so if we ever had this problem again and it hasn't gotten so bad that it wears into the yoke we can replace these new joints now well like most modern vehicles the serpentine belt is a real pain so down underneath of the top engine mount there you'll see a hex I believe it's cast right into the aluminum arm of the tensioner it's got a nineteen millimeter hex cast right into it so you take a ratchet with a socket preferably a flex head and you'll be able to reach down in there and if you push down on it hard enough you'll release the tension on the belt and you can get it out and it is not fun to get a new one routed in there now you would think it would be easy because this car doesn't have like power steering or an actual radiator fan that runs off the belt but they make up for that by giving you basically no room to work so I'll see if I can wrestle it out of there alright the new belt looks to be the same length you can see how much the old belt has worn I'm guessing it's original 200 mm what 15,000 miles on it so definitely a long-overdue for a change well that's just not a fun job at all got it on there finally one thing I found helpful is I can if I get it just right I can hook my ratchet underneath of the pulley on the alternator and it kinda keeps the tensioner and select while I work try to get the belt fit on there that's that's just no fun luckily I have a very helpful in supporting life which sits in the house and sends me text messages like this okay car runs and drives good but the full formula drive lights still on so I think we got to clear some codes out of here okay let's do the old Auto scan here see what it comes up with so anyway the four-wheel drive module it's got this C 1299 it's a current code I guess cancellation of four wheel drive control there's a bunch of other history code stored in the thing so probably all related to that drive shaft being removed but the car will run and drive just fine but it knows that the drive shafts not there so you know it's measuring the speed sensors I guess on on either differential and comparing the two and it knows so I'm gonna clear the codes and we'll call it a day not too bad of a job the serpentine belt took me longer than both of those things combined so yeah anyway thanks guys for watching probably not you know gonna be a very popular video but I like to throw these how-to videos out just in case anybody has the you know the exact same problem that I do

Channel: Watch Wes Work

Views: 83,173

Rating: 4.9523911 out of 5

Keywords: Toyota, rav4, driveshaft, propshaft, ujoint, u-joint, repair, replace, non-replaceable, non-serviceable, staked, reman, cardone, mechanic, swaybar, swaybar links, moog, codes, 4wd

Id: iR1LcqCPpls

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 15 2019