Well it's fitted.....but it took a lot longer than planned!
In some respects this job was far easier than on my old B5 A4 ; the front wishbone easily came apart, I tied the hub out of the way and tried to get the outer cv joint off....I tried the method of screwing in the driveshaft bolt to force it off but it ran out of thread before the joint had moved at all!
Try as I might, no amount of hammering would get the joint to budge!
Eventually I decided to remove the whole driveshaft which was surprisingly easy, I had been apprehensive to undo the inner joint as the Haynes describes some models where gearbox oil escapes once the inner joint is undone...
I needn't have worried though as once the bolts (M10 multi-spline) were undone the joint easily came apart and it was a sealed inner joint , so no mess!
Once the driveshaft had been extracted came the fun of trying to get that old joint off!
Even clamped in a vice on the bench in my garage using various drifts it wouldn't move!
The only way it was going to come off was by using the bolt method again.
At this stage I should add that after a lot of deliberation about repro vs Genuine I couldn't justify at least £26 on a Genuine boot (the cheapest I could find) when a GKN kit from ECP could be had for a fraction of that.
I sourced one from Euro Car Parts when they had a discount offer on (as they always do!) and it came in at a little over £9 for the whole kit.
On examination , it was apparent the driveshaft had never been off before and the whole thing , boot and all was the 2006 factory fitment.
Well, guess what, it was made by GKN, it was complete with date marks for 2006, along with OEM part numbers and the Audi /VW logo's .
Both the old and new boot were the same hard thermoplastic composition so I'm confident it will last well.
The driveshaft bolt in the kit was different to the one I took off.
The factory bolt was a 27mm hexagon-headed conventional bolt with a massively thick (3mm) fixed washer whilst the new bolt had a 17mm recessed hex head with no washer.
I have a well equipped garage but I don't have a hex drive socket that big!
Luckily this new bolt was longer in the thread than the old one so I still thought I'd give it a go to get the joint off...
I managed to find a nut and bolt knocking around the garage that was 17mm in size, so I used this as a driver (in conjunction with a 17mm socket and ratchet) to screw the new hub bolt into the end of the CV joint.
I was lucky, the joint moved about 50% of the distance it needed to and I managed to drift it off the remaining distance, it would have been much easier though had the hub bolt been longer!
I'm going to try and source a longer bolt for future use (16mm diameter thread) as with one of these the joint removal would have been a doddle.
Putting the new boot back on was simple and reinstalling everything went easily too.
I had to re-use the old hub bolt simply because I didn't have the correct 17mm hex socket to tighten up the new bolt.
So, the job only cost me £9 or so, although it did take approaching 5 hrs!
If I'd taken the driveshaft out in the first place and had a longer bolt to get the joint off it would taken less than half that, I'm prepared now for the next time I need to do it!
