Rear Axle

I wanted to highlight once more the ultimate craptitude of this 1966 galaxie 500XL. Just to recap, the engine was buggered, the transmission went thermonuclear, the frame bent, body bent and interior in a really sad state. The question is would the rear axle be useable.

Spoiler: no.

Yes every single major part was completely destroyed in one fashion or another on this car.

Just to recap, here's the rear axle after blasting. How bad could it be... after all it spins.

Oh good grief.

If only you had smellivision.

I spent 50 dollars on brake clean, acetone and countless rolls of paper towels and rags to clean the inside of this housing. It was putrid. To scrub the inside of the axle tubes I went to Wally World and bought 3 kitchen bottle brushes and duct taped them in a delta configuration to a piece of conduit and rotated and scrubbed. I spent all afternoon just cleaning this.

The tally on the damage is the axle shafts have deep grooves worn in them from the seals and are beyond salvage. The differential feels and sounds like it's grinding walnuts when you turn the axle shafts by hand with no tyres.

Now the good; the housing, pinion support, yoke and by some miracle the gear set (3.0:1) is serviceable.

If I were to rate this car from a scale of 1 to 10, I'd have to use negative integers.

The saga continues.

Cheers