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Wow, what a ride this was. It was a 6 hour ordeal. I ordered the full rebuild kits from oldmoparts.com even though I thought only the boots needed replaced. The Factory Service Manual says that you can replace the boot without removing the cross pin from the shaft, but after an hour's work or so I decided that my skill level must not be good enough to do this. I pressed out the cross pin, and cleaned everything out well, installed the new boot, then pressed-in the new pin from the kit. This all went pretty well. Then I started to assemble the balls and needle bearings. The trouble starts here. The needles were all rusted to the new ball assemblies. I was able to save the new balls, but had to re-use my old needles because the new ones were too pitted up to use. Then I tried to slide the body back over the balls. It wouldn't slide on. I found that the new cross pin was 1.8 mm to long! I had to press the pin back out and grind it until it was the same length as the old pin, then re-assemble everything. When I did the second joint, I just re-used all the original metal parts, replacing only the boot and end seal. I'm going to send all the "new" rusty parts back to oldmoparts.com and hope to get replacements or perhaps a partial refund.
Why, oh why, did Desoto (and Chrysler) choose to use this style of u-joint???
Did you have a banging sound from the rear when you put the car in reverse? Why did you seek to change the u-Joint or service it? A transmission guy looked at my Desoto 55 Firedome and said "If it ain't broke don't fix it"..I only hear this sound when the car is first engaged in reverse. Once the car has been running for awhile the gears seem to engage quietly.
No noise at all. The rubber boots were torn. Grease was escaping, and dirt was getting in. I just wanted to prevent future problems.
