Attacking the rear end

Back home again and an attempt to catch up a little on lost time. One thing worth remembering when picking up donor parts, like I did from a BMW breakers is to get them to undo the rear drive shaft retaining nuts (rear wheel bearing nut). This is much easier when the back axel is attached to the car but when it's lying on the garage floor there is nothing to stop it spinning. To get around this I put the wheels back on and put a metal rod through them.

At this point I made my first expensive mistake. I only had a 32mm socket and tried to remove the drive shaft nuts. It worked fine on one side but it kept slipping on the other. So what did brains do? I got a angle grinder out and removed part of the lip on the hub to give me more room to get to the nut. It still didn't work and I was forced to buy the correct size socket 31mm and it came off a treat. Once off I realised I actually needed the hubs!

Not a smart move - I had to buy two new hubs from BMW for £65 each, they do look good though :-)

Once the nuts were off I removed as much of the rear suspension parts as I could (anti roll bars and control arms etc) and then removed the drive shafts from the diff by removing the torx bolts.

A screwdriver between the torx to stop the shaft spinning while undoing them.

Now left with two drive shafts still containing the hubs. This is where my new puller came in handy ...

 ... but it wasn't actually a hub puller so I needed to clamp the three legs of the puller to stop them slipping off the hub.

Typically one came off nice and easily but the other didn't but then a brain wave - I didn't need a puller at all; I just picked up the whole thing including trailing arm, rested the hub on the bench with the shaft facing downwards and bashed the shaft with a hammer and out it came!

 The drive shafts, a clean up and they looked almost new. No leaks, no cracks in the rubber gaiters - perfect. Interestinng, the car was from 96 and the labels on the end of the drive shafts stated 98, perhaps I didn't get the rear suspension unit from my donor!

On to the uprights and bearings. I used a press at work and everything was going great, the bearing slid into the upright no problem and then a split seconds lack of concentration I started pressing in the hub before I had put the locking washer on. I then pressed out the hub which left part of the bearing on the hub. To cut a long story short the bearing had to be binned - £45 for a new one. The other one was fine.

All the necessary parts - a little bit of oil helps the bearing go in.

TIP: When pressing in the hub, support the bearing from underneath with a socket otherwise it may crack - this is exactly what happened to my bearing (the long version of the story)

I need to dremmel a groove into the remaining part of the bearing and crack it off so the new one can go on.

The one that worked!