1968 XL Axle Update

Even though the car had a few hundred miles, it took awhile to discover that oil was being spat out the vent tube slowly and it took time for it to work down the inner frame and start to leave a puddle on the ground. After spending some time scratching ones head and investigating the reason, it just turns out that when I added the drain plug it changed the flow dynamics of the oil and created a small spray of fine mist of oil out the vent location.

The only recourse was to move the location of the vent tube. That of course means taking the axle back out, plugging the old hole and drilling and tapping the new hole.

The axle is back out, drained and the inside degreased. You can see I already started going through the '68 XL's original axle in the background.

The idea is to move the hole where the blue tape is and plug the existing hole.

Just as simple as this. Well well I say simple I'm negating all the tedious work of removing the axle and cleaning it out.

It was just dumb luck that the drain plug created the oil spray near the original vent tube location. You can't win them all first time around.

Going back in for the second time.

I'm getting pretty good at this. There's nothing really else to show about this axle. There's no more oil being ejected, problem solved. Interestingly it looks like the Ford full size generation previous (1964 and earlier) had the vent tube close to where I moved it to. Ford seemed to move it higher up on the centre section for 1965.

That concludes this axle project for the 1968 XL, however if you're interested on what happened to the 1968 XL's original axle, then read on.

I ended up going through it and found the problem with why the yoke felt like it was grinding walnuts when you turn it by hand. In short there was an ingress of water into the axle and it sat for some time in the past. The water settled at the bottom (pinion/yoke) it caused the pinion bearings and races to rust and pit badly.

Since this was a spare heavy duty (large bearing Ford 9") and I didn't want to trip over it in storage, I decided to refresh it as cheaply as I could and put this in the 1966 plain jane gal 500 that's just a parts car and since that parts car came with a 352 FE and FX transmission it had the light duty (small bearing) 9" axle. I figured I would just toss the old light duty 9" as no one in the past wanted my other old ones for free.

For this spare heavy duty axle I had an assortment of using pinion and carrier bearings so I picked the best looking ones. I did use new seals on the pinion and axle shafts and of course a new differential gasket. I replaced the axle shaft bearings earlier in the year so those were fine. I mostly reused the recent new brakes that were installed earlier in the year. The only difference is I used a brand new rubber rear brake line for the 1965/66 galaxie 500's. My car chum in California was very nice and threw in new brakes hoses in the complete 1966 galaxie 500 brake package I bought from him for basically 40 dollars shipping. He has NOS brake parts and puts brake kits together to sells on E-Bay but these weren't moving and in his generosity offered me a complete all wheel drum brake kit for the 66 gal 500 for the price of shipping. A BIG thank you to him for all those parts.