Front and rear axle issues

[retro-roco]

Have been busy lately tearing down the front and rear axles on my G506. The good news is that the front axle internals all look like new! I need to order a few parts, and it should be ready to go back together. Seems I'm missing the inner most seals (inside the knuckle housing), and one pair of front wheel bearing adjusting nuts.

Now for the bad news. I knew I had a seal failure on the drivers side rear axle, but tear down revealed the problems to be much greater than that. At some point, some one drilled new holes in the axle flange (equally spaced, all the way around, effectively doubling the number of holes). they also drilled new, matching holes in the hub, again located between the existing holes. the only problem is that they didn't do as well locating the holes in the hub. The hole circle is offset, relative to the center of the hub, the holes are oversized (compared to the originals), and when they were drilled and tapped, some of them actually penetrated the center of the hub. Since the hole circle is offset or eccentric, it threw the axle shaft offset as well, causing it to wear on the inside of the axle housing. Fortunately is appears that the axle shaft was sacrificed rather than the axle housing. There were globs of axle shaft metal fused to the inside of the axle housing, requiring a good deal of dremel work to grind them down.

I am pretty sure that I have an extra axle shaft somewhere in my stash of parts, but I know that I don't have a spare rear hub lying around... I guess I should be thankful that it didn't ruin the axle housing too!

Here's a pic of the buggered up hub, and axle shaft:

[pfarber]

Holy smokes did they use a piece of Swiss cheese as a template?

I did a very brief look at the SNLs and the good part is that the CCKW and Chevy do list hubs with G085 part numbers, so they may interchange. I didn't do a line be line but there were enough G085 numbers listed to lead me to believe that the banjo hubs can be swapped about.

One thing that confused me with the Chevy parts is that they do make a difference between the hub being in front of or behind the drum. What does that mean? Is that like the demountable drums on a CCKW where you don't have to take off the hub to get to the drum?

In a pinch, if the parts are hard to find, you can always weld those holes up and re-drill using the shaft as a template. There might be run out issues but nothing a quick trip to a lathe wouldn't fix.