The Muhlestein Family

CV Boots on the Hyundai Elantra

November 20th, 2007

For some reason, I keep thinking that it’s better to spend 8 hours working on a vehicle than to drop it off somewhere and pay someone over $200 to do some work.

Anyway, last time I changed CV boots, I had to do 3 of them on my truck. I got all the tools, the parts, and the know how back then, so I thought I’d just go ahead and pick up a new boot kit and do the work Saturday night. Well, as usually happens with my projects, I run into something along the way that makes things take more time. All this applies to our 1999 Hyundai Elantra. (So if anyone finds this by searching, they can learn from my experience.)

The first thing that happened was me braking two lug bolts trying to get the wheel and hub nut off. Who ever heard of lug nuts that won’t come off? I don’t know why they were froze on there. I think that last time I had my tires rotated, the studs were damaged. Whatever the reason, they were stuck on there hard enough for my big 1/2 drive tire iron wrench to just break them off instead of unscrewing them. (I really tried not to break them by the way but they just wouldn’t unscrew.)

The next problem I had was that I couldn’t get the drive axel out. There are 5 bolts around the inner cv joint that came off on my truck. I took those out on the car but the axel still didn’t come out. all my prying and wiggling didn’t change anything.

I decided to just go ahead and change the boot while it was on still attached. No problem because I was changing the outer boot anyway and had already separated the outer axel from the hub (which was pretty easy compared to my truck. I didn’t even have to separate a ball joint or anything). After removing the old boot, I again became stumped at taking the CV joint apart. I gave up and put it all together since it was 11:00 pm by this time.

On Monday, I bought a service manual. I immediately discovered 3 things.

1. You don’t have to take out the 5 bolts to get the drive axel out. Instead, you just pry the joint out of the transmission. I did that and it wasn’t really even that hard.
2. You cannot take the outer CV Joint apart. This is the weirdest thing I’ve seen yet. The joint is pressed together instead of clipped. To change it, you have to remove the Inner joint, slide the boot over the axel to replace the outer boot, and then replace the inner boot again.
3. Buying the service manual is worth the $18.

Well, I had to head back to the store yet again to get more clamps and new boot grease for the inner CV boot. The extra boot clamps I picked up for the inner boot were the kind that you crimp on. Those are easy and go on real tight. Unfortunately, the clamps that came with the boot kit for the outer joint were those universal clamps that are variable length and supposedly you pull tight with a pair of pliers while pushing with a screw driver. Those things really stink. If I wasn’t so tired of driving back to the auto store, I’d have gone and got some more crimp-on clamps. Instead, I wasted an extra 1/2 hour or so until I finally got the dumb universal clamps to work.

Well, this morning (Tuesday) I drove the car in with only two lug nuts holding the front wheel on. The service manual says that you have to have special tools to get the hub apart (which I would have had to do to replace the lug bolts) so I just took it into the local tire place who said they could do the job for $30 or so.

As my neighbor Brian pointed out in my last post about trees, this might should have been filed in the “I thought it was a good idea until…” category It could probably go in the “I’m to cheap to spend money on…” category. But Hey, I didn’t have to spend $200+ to have someone fix it for me!

Entry Filed under: Misc