Regrease CV joint?

[Crispin]

So I found grease being flung out of the one CV joint due to a broken clip. (here) I stopped off at my local Toyota today for some brake pads. The friendly folk there said they don't stock or sell the clips and if they ever need to replace them, a hosepipe clamp is what they use. "In fact, we have a whole shelve of them, some take a handfull to make sure you have the right size"

So, armed with clamp, I fix boot to stop any more grease coming out. My question is now on replacing lost grease.
Would it be ok to break the clip on the joint side (large), peel the boot back, whack a whole bunch of grease in there, and replace the boot?

or, do I need to take the whole lot off and pack the inside of the joint?

 

[Chris]

The problem with CV grease is that is extremely immobile. In other words it doesn't move about. So if you whack a load into the gaiter and close it up, the grease will barely distribute itself. If you pack it into an 80 CV and have a look in a few miles, you'll see that it's pretty much where you left it. By this token, the CV grease that came out of the boot, may well just have been that which was at the edge of the boot in the first place.

C

 

[sae70]

We had the inner CV joint fail on out Subaru Forester due to a loose/missing inner boot tie & over time spinning out all of the grease

After spending a couple of weeks spannering Fiery prior to my rescent Wales trip one of the observations that I made was that both the outer inner CV joint boot ties were weaping a little grease I wiped them both clean & checked them a couple of days later to find that they were wet again, so for my trip to Wales decided to just put a large cable tie over each of the existing OME ties to exert a little more pressure to help seal the boot to the shaft with the intension of makeing a better fix @ a future date Must add this to my pre Lincomb list I shall probably not do any more than remove the existing OME clips, clean the shaft & boot & re-tie using a cable tie (no new grease or checking) but mine have not spun out nearly as much grease as yours have

Remembering that a little goes a long way

If it was me with the situation that you have there, I'd probably remove both ties (inner & outer) slide the boot along the shaft so I could check for water/dirt ingress, if all OK chuck a bit grease @ the rear of the CV joint slide the boot back on & re-tie

 

[Keith Shuttleworth]

Found this on another forum, not tested myself, so make of it what you will.

( When the grease gets warm it will find it's way into the joint. I proved this years ago. I had a client with a worn CV, I could not get one 'on the quick' and he was about to go on holiday, I stripped the joint and packed (Black) grease in the normal way, it was at that point I thought about a test, with the owners aggreement once I had assembled the joint I pumped in a different coloured (Red)grease. Whilst the owner was away I ordered up a new joint, he returned from his round trip which was only about 700 miles and upon stripping I found the two greases well mixed and INSIDE the CV was a mixture of Red and Black. I can only assume the grease gets warm enough to become semi liquid and this enables it to 'move about' and mix.

There was no 'soup' indicating a typical oil seal failure scenario.

If you consider Toyota advise 'topping up' the knuckles and the CV's then they rarely need any attention at all for many years, as further evidence my car still had the OE CV's in place after 16 years!

The service history indicating a strip clean and repack at about 60,000 miles and then IIRC five years later.

If you have no idea what the servicing has been like then perhaps you want to do an axle strip and rebuild if you are just doing run of the mill servicing and are not looking for a specific problem I would just top up as per my post. )

 

[Crispin]

Thanks folks,

I have a pot of CV grease so will have a gander tomorrow. I did do one very short trip through water so will check for that. I'll whack a load in and close it up again just for fun.