At my last track day the Integra developed a leak from the stock passenger side axle that caused a terrible sound. Since they where over 12 years old and had 100,000 miles of mostly daily drive miles I felt is was time for a new pair.
The axles are the road/race upgrade from the driveline shop. These where more expensive than the stock replacements, but I wanted one set of axles for any upgrades I might have in the future. The stock replacements are good for 220hp, these road/race versions are good til 300hp. The road/race version also come with high temperature grease, and a tube in the boots to vent heat.
This swap is straight forward, and easy to follow if you have a service manual, I want to give a few tips that I picked up along the way. The first is get a air gun and a 32mm socket. I tried all the different ways to do this with one and they just waste your time.
This is what you need it for, the axle nut. With the gun you don’t need to bend the nut, or chance scratching the car with a 4ft long breaker bar.
The next tip is to use a pitman arm puller, this was used on both sides of the car to get the lower ball joint off. The other hint that helped me that wasn’t in the books was to undo the front sway bar. The bolt is on the right side of this picture. Once it’s dropped you have lots of access to the axle.
The stock axle just needs a push from a pry bar between it and the transmission, and it pops right out. The new axle slides right in, just push til you here the pop of the retainer clip.
The drivers side is just as easy once you know the few hints i figured out. The first thing is to spray penetration fluid all over the connection between the axle and the intermediate shaft. Do this before you take the suspension apart to give it time to work.
Take the suspension apart the same as on the passenger side, I also took off the shock fork to give the axle more room to slide out, I didn’t need to do this on the passengers side. The engine takes up most of the room you had on the other side.
once you have the suspension apart, and gave the axle some time to soak the penetrate fluid take a block of wood and a hammer and hit the axle to slide it out. I tried to hit it with a rubber mallet but it didn’t work, and a straight hammer hit would do too much damage. The block of wood was perfect, and did the job with only two hits.
Here is picture of the axle removed and a look at the intermediate shaft that connects to the transmission.
The last thing to do once the nut is properly torqued is to index the nut with a punch, this was only achieved with the wheel off. The next race is in Phrump in October so we will see what improvement if any these improvements have on the car.