Bent rear axle! Straighten?
 

I'm working on a salvage project and the axle was a bit out of whack.

what to do?

The car took a medium hit in an accident and the left rear was about 2 degrees off camber and 1 degree front to back.

I've never done anything like this before but decided I didn't want to spend money on another axle so its worth a try. I dropped the axle this past sunday and strapped it into the passenger seat of my Mark VIII for a ride to work.

After I finished my 10 hour shift today I tack welded her to a nice solid and level bench. With the axle centered and level took a few measurements and I used the angle finder on my iphone to set the base plate at-0.5 camber similar to the undamaged side. Buttoned it up with some fresh mig welds and tossed it back in the Mark for a ride home. Total time 45 mins not including yanking that bugger out of the car.

questions, comments and concerns are welcome

picture after cutting off hub base plate with die grinder and cleaning off factory welds
Attachment 28915

Axle back at home! top view showing two new welds inside plate in addition to replacing the factory weld around the outside and bottom
Attachment 28916

nice job. i've used that iphone angle thingy a few times as well. pretty handy at times.

Sounds like you got it back to within tolerances and the welds are very good, so give it a try.

Thanks! the iphone is way more than a camera, i love it for many reasons.

lets hope so. I eyeballed the front to back offset so lets hope for the best when it gets put back together this week. Ha!

I cut and weld metal everyday for a living, so the welding was the easy part of the job for me. That axle was pretty happy installed in the car and didn't really want to come out. Wrestling it out while feeling under the weather this weekend really wiped me out.

"That axle was pretty happy installed in the car and didn't really want to come out."

Tell me about it, had a 14 bolt rear end flip off some jack stands and break my sternum a few years back, pulling axles is never fun.

Cool, Nice job :twothumbs:


843-

bummer about the injury. What was the "14 bolt" in ??

That 14 bolt was coming out of a one ton Chevy G-30 van when it decided to squish me a wee bit. Luckily for me sleeper, I wasn't under the pumpkin or I wouldn't be here, those axles are flippin' heavy.

Yes beefy rear & heavy.. IIRC 9.5" or older was 10.5" ring gear.

Yeah, after that axle was done trying to do me in, we narrowed it and installed it in a Jeep CJ-3B set up for rock crawling. Somewhere I have pics of that beast, it was running a 402 Chevy big block with nitrous and seemed quite capable of driving up the side of an office tower.

Very Cool, I dig the old Jeeps too..


(sorry for sidetrack OP)