I was excited! Now I could actually move the
Cruiser into the garage away from the heat, humidity and worst of all the
mosquitoes! My next step was to bolt the drive shaft back in so I could do
just that. Piece of cake right? Well .. See a familiar pattern here? As with
most Cruiser repair jobs there is always the rest of the story ...
Seems that the reason my brother had the rear
axle out in the first place was to replace the third member. The original
one had dropped a C-clip at high speed and pretty much trashed itself. He
had obtained a third member from the front of a junked FJ40 and you guessed
it, it was from a later year! This of course meant the pinion flange had the
larger bolt hole pattern and would not match up with the drive shaft. TLCA
to the rescue .. I searched the archives and asked a couple of questions of
the list and found out that it was easy to fix the problem, just remove the
pinion flange from the third member, clamp it to the rear drive shaft flange
after aligning the holes and use a 25/64" drill to make the flange holes
slightly elongated. Well that's exactly what I did. Here is the drilled flange.
As you can see it does not take much at all. I did have to use a Dremel tool
with a grinder bit to fine tune this approach. As I do not yet have a drill
press and the bit walked on me a bit.
Fig. 1
OK so NOW I could bolt it back in the Cruiser.
I got to looking around for the drive shaft. bolts and was amazed when I actually
found them in one of the boxes in the back of the Cruiser! Maybe the Cruiser
gods aren't calling !Oy home just yet ...
The shaft was installed and a trip was taken
up the driveway and around the court! Illegal as hell! I had no insurance,
tags or even title! I didn't care, it moved! I felt like a bona fide Cruiser
head that day. Little did I know the trials and tribulations that were to
follow ... At least I could park it in the garage now.
Fig. 2
Me, !Oy and my neighbor Al After
The Illegal Maiden Trip
Al passed away in April of 2007 before I got to take him for a ride in the
FJ....
