Downgear

After reading countless great posts and going through everyone's tips I decided to complete my secondary shaft bearing repair myself and would like to put together a detailed DIY to help others.

As Billman suggested, the bad bearing was the tapered roller bearing on the secondary shaft. I think I caught it fairly early and it only had severe visible damage on 3 of the rollers. My question is how do I identify if other bearings are damaged. They all have visible "scratch" marks but are smooth to the touch.


This is the tapered roller bearing that is definitely bad with severe pitting.


This is the needle bearing on the countershaft that has visible scratching but I am not sure if this is normal wear or if it should be replaced while I am in the transmission?



For reference, this is a new tapered roller bearing vs a used one...is this scratching normal wear and tear for an AP1 with 80k miles?



Full DIY with many of my own tips and tricks to come as I work through this job...

Downgear

For anyone that has had trouble with the 6mm hex bolts on the driveshaft, I wanted to share my technique for effortless removal. The biggest problem with these bolts is that you have very little clearance and you will easily strip them if your hex key goes in on an angle. It is an absolute must to purchase stubby hex keys shown in the picture below and use them with a 1/4" breaker bar. I also ground the top of the hex key completely flat according to Billman to make sure I used every last mm of the hex key. I got all 6, 15 year old AP1 6mm bolts out with not a single issue. This car has even seen a few winters!


You can see the huge size difference between traditional hex keys vs stubby.

vwynn

Looking forward to the DIY... probably wont tackle this on my own however it would be great to see how difficult it was to get out.!

Great post.

Car Analogy

The traditional socket wrench and hex socket on the right is exactly what I used to remove both ends of my ap2 driveshaft. All I did was slide the driveshaft out of the way of the bolts, sliding it on its splines, which gained the needed clearance. Sliding it forward to do the rear bolts, fwd to do fronts. The hex went in perfectly straight, and I reused all the bolts.

I admit my hex socket is a little bit shorter than yours. Maybe that is enough to make the difference.

Downgear

Below is a better view of the wear on the needle bearing at the end of the countershaft. Should I replace this bearing?
I am anxious to get this project wrapped up but I am not sure if this is normal wear and tear or it should be replaced in addition to the tapered roller bearings on the secondary shaft.

Downgear

I think i am going to skip this last bearing as to me it seems like just normal wear and tear.

I did not pull the transmission, but if this bearing looks like this, I bet others in the transmission do as well. I have also never heard of this particular bearing failing as it is always the bearings on the secondary shaft that I have just replaced.