Toyota Matrix Pontiac Vibe Front Driver & Passenger Side 2 Piece CV Axle Assembly Set TRQ CSA82515

Okay, friends. One of the first things we need to do is safely raise and support our vehicle so the suspension is hanging. Once you have the suspension hanging, we're gonna remove our 5 21-millimeter lug nuts. Let's get our wheel off of here. Now, what I like to do is take one of my lug nuts start it on here so it's gonna hold the rotor up against hub so can't wobble around.

The next thing we need to do is remove our axle nut. You're gonna want to 12 point 30-millimeter, it looks like this. If for some reason when you're trying to take this off, you notice that it was just spin spin spinning, obviously that can be an issue if you're trying to use a ratchet. If that's the case, use a nice long pry bar, come along in between your studs, bring it down to the ground to hold it still. The next thing we need to do is spray between the hub and the axle itself just so we can break this free. At this point what you would wanna do is use a nice hammer, and give this a couple of loving bonks, we're not gonna be reusing the axle obviously because we're replacing it so we don't have to worry about the threads but essentially just kind of push it so that is nice and free.

The next thing that we're gonna need to do is get a little bit of slack from our break hose here, you're gonna find a mounting bolt right there. Once we remove this with our 14-millimeter we should have plenty of slack. Get that out of there. So now we need to follow our lower control arm and we're gonna find three mounting hardwares down under here, there's gonna be two nuts and then one bolt. I'm gonna start with 2 nuts and then I'll start loosening the bolt using a 17-millimeter. What you're gonna notice is it's gonna start to separate, be careful. Okay. Here we go.

Now let's take a nice pry bar, come through the bottom of the control arm and the slot and we're just gonna draw this down. Just be careful for the bar not to slide out, you don't want to pinch any fingers, but we're gonna pull the ball joint out and slide to the side. So now, looking at your little splash shield here if you were to come along in front of this area, you're gonna find there's a little push clip. Let's go ahead and take that out of there. Okay, there it is. Now let's come into the wheel well and you're gonna see 2 10-millimeter headed bolts, remove the pair. Grab this, bring it down and out of the way.

The next thing we're gonna do is grab on to the caliber right here and push on the axle, we're gonna try to separate these two. Once we have it started, grab the axle from the backside and pull it out of the knuckle itself. Now for a safety precaution, we're gonna go ahead and tie this axle to the control arm so there's no where can go because after that we need to actually pop the axle out of the transmission.
Now, we need to get the axle out of the transmission. To do that, you can do it one of two ways. Use a pry bar like this. And then, come right up against any lip that you can grab onto and give it a couple loving bonks with a hammer, that's gonna help pop it out of the transmission. Otherwise, what you could try to do of course is to use a nice long pry bar assuming you have enough space underneath the vehicle, come in between, give it a little pry and pop it right out of there. I'm just gonna go with this punch because it's something that has a little less clearance. Okay, so it's starting to come out. That's a great thing. Something that I wanna mention real quick is you wanna make sure you have a collection bucket laying underneath here down on the ground. There's gonna be fluid that comes out your transmission, and we wanna make sure that we can recycle it. All right, let's continue getting this out of here. So now that we have that nice and loose, let's go and get our safety strap off of here. Now we're just gonna go ahead and give it a couple of tugs, see if we can get it out of the transmission. There it is, friends.

Okay, now that the axle is out of the transmission, we have a nice clear view of the seal. It's always a great idea to go ahead and replace the seal, partially because now is a great time and secondly because you can't always see if there's an issue. If for some reason you don't have one, it's a great idea to make sure you clean it down and inspect it. Let's go ahead and do that real quick. I'm just gonna wipe it down with a nice clean rag, you just wanna be careful not to put too much pressure because of course there's a spring inside there and you don't want to damage it. Take a peek with a mirror, make sure everything is in good condition if you're not replacing it.

Now, it's gonna be time to get our axle in here, we wanna go and slide it in so the splined area is going into the transmission. Try to make it as straight as possible as it goes in. I'm gonna move the knuckle out of the way a little bit. You can try to push this in, but overall what works best is a nice rubber mallet on the very end. You definitely don't wanna use a regular hammer because you don't wanna chisel up those threads. Okay, so we just bottomed that out, I'm gonna get underneath the vehicle, I'm gonna double-check to make sure it's completely bottomed out, and then we'll continue.

Next, we're gonna spray the splines on the axle with a little bit of copper never-seize. So take your axle in one hand, go ahead and grab your knuckle, slide it aside, and then put this end into the bearing/knuckle area. Okay. That should start coming through, if it doesn't line up, just give it a little twist until it does. There we are. Stick out pry bar, we can pull down on this. Line up your ball joint studs with the actual control arm itself. There we are. Start in your bolt and start the other two nuts, then we'll snug them up. Snug these up starting with the bolt. Let's torque these to 66-foot-pounds. Now let's get our axle nut on here. We're just gonna bottom this out and then we'll work it to a 159-foot-pounds. Let's get our flex hose reattached, make sure you get your mounting bolt in there. Make sure it's secure. Let's get this cover back here. Got two screws and one push clip from underneath. Okay, so we've got our little push clip, it's gonna go through the first one and into the second plate here, make sure that they're secure, you don't want this falling off.

Now, it's gonna be time to go ahead and torque our axle nut, there's gonna be a couple ways that you can go about doing that. The way that I'm gonna do it is I'm gonna put the wheel back on here, start all my lug nuts so they're bottomed out and then when I get it back down on the ground so the wheel is just barely touching, I'll be able to torque the axle nut and the lug nuts at the same time. Otherwise, if you wanna put a bar going through your lug studs, you'll be able to torque this when it's much lower to the ground.

Now, that we have the wheel on we have just barely touching the ground so it can't spin, we're gonna torque our axle nut first. Like I said before, we're gonna torque this to 159 foot-pounds, that's super important. We know it's torqued, there's something else that we need to do with it. If you look at the axle, you can see that there's a slot. If for some reason your slot isn't facing up, maybe it's facing down or over to the side, you could, of course, jack back up the vehicle and spin the wheel until it faces up, that's gonna be the easiest way. Next, we'll take a punch and a hammer and we're gonna peen this nut over so it falls down into that slot. That's how we're gonna lock the nut on there, and that's how you're gonna be as safe as possible. So, as you could tell, I have this pressed all the way down. The farther the better. You want it to basically touch up against the axle as much as possible, and make it so there's no way that the nut can accidentally loosened up on its own. Let's move along to torquing these lug nuts to 76-foot-pounds. Torqued.

So now it's gonna be time to fill the transmission fluid. If you come down along the driver side of the transmission, right along here, you're going to see a fill plug. When you find the fill plug, make sure you slide your little collection bucket under there so we can make sure we recycle any fluid that may come out. Use your 24-millimeter socket, go ahead remove that plug. And now we're gonna fill it was 75-90 gear oil. And I wanna cut the tip just like this so I have a nice little point that go into that transmission. Now I'm gonna put it down in there. As we fill it, we wanna fill it up just till there's a small trickle of fluid coming out down into our collection bucket. Once it's done that, we know it's full, we'll go ahead and tighten it right up. So if I can get the right angle. There we are. Put it in there, give it some nice squeezes.

All right, so as you can tell I have a nice little trickle coming out. If yours is coming out faster than that just wait until it comes to a trickle. Now it's time to make sure we clean our fill plug here, go ahead and wipe it down, there should be a gasket right on it. If you want to replace it, it's probably a good idea. If you don't replace it just kind of make sure it's clean and it's not damaged in any way.

Okay, so I've got that snugged up by hand. Now, I'm just gonna use a nice short ratchet, put it on here. Essentially, once it bottoms out which is right there, I'm gonna give it a teeny bit more. And that's it. You don't go too much further than that, you don't want to strip out your transmission.

Now let's clean up our mess, close the hood, and take it for a road test.