Broken Axle

[aussieQ]

Hi Guys,

Thought you may be interested in hearing about my recent broken axle adventure. A couple of weeks ago June and I were out on our clubs long weekend run to Bendigo, about 170K from home. The car of course was runing beautifuly. We had a minor problem as we started on our trip. Only a kilometer from home the bonnet (or hood as you call it) came loose and started to flap. Thinking I had forgotten to do up the catch I stoped by the side of the road grabed the catch and pulled it to do it up. The catch came off in my hand. The next hour was spent trying to find something that would fasten the front of the bonnet down satisfactorly to last the next four days. Late morning we were back on the road ready to start our journey again. Including a couple of short stops along the way it took us about anouther 4 hours to reach our destination. The next day we had gone into town for a look around. As I was taking off and changing gear from 1st to 2nd there was a slight thump from the rear and the car started to slow. Thinking it had jumped out of gear I stoped and selected first and tried to take off again. No luck.
I wasn't sure what the problem was but a passing fellow club member checked it out and told me that he thought it was a broken rear axle. Fortuneatly we were insured against breakdowns and soon had the car picked up for transporting home and had a hire car supplied for us to complete our weekend touring.
The car arrived home on the following Tuesday and by that time I had located two second hand axles, one to replace the broken one and a spare to keep under the seat.
Pulling the broken axle out wasn't as easy as I was led to believe. I made up an axle puller but couldn't budge it using the puller. I ended up having to heat up the axle housing around the bearing shell and with the wheel fitted loosely used it like a slide hammer to impact the axle. This finally worked and the axle and bearings came out. The next problem was to remove the broken piece of axle shaft. To do this I had to remove the good axle on the other side of the car and using a very thin long piece of metal rod slid it through the axle housing and pushed the broken shaft towards the other end. It took some juggling but we finally got it out the other side.
When I removed the good axle I was suprised to see that it appeared to be of a later manufacture than the used axles I had sourced and was very well made and clearly branded (see attached photo).  Has anyone seen axles with the same branding?