Man, it has been a long, long time since I updated this.
The last update was back in April of 2013. I dyno’d the car and put down a (respectable for a mostly stock Corolla) 105.5 rwhp & 93.8 ft-lbs of torque. After that, I continued to daily drive Ariel with very little fuss (lolz, yeah right!).
May 10, 2013
I was out driving, thinking about scoping out some “free” tires at a local tire shop that puts their old ones in an outside collection area, when I heard a terrifying noise from the rear end.
It was a great big clunk. And not just one clunk. A few weeks earlier the bolts holding the driveshaft to the pinion cam loose and I lost two of the 4 bolts. It made a terrible noise as the driveshaft wobbled around, working the rest of the bolts loose. The noise this evening was different though. It wasn’t the driveshaft. I pulled over and looked at that first. Everything was still snug there.
There wasn’t any fluids leaking and the engine ran the same was ever. I could rev it in gear (clutch in) and not get the noise, but if I drove, it would clunk occasionally. It was worse the faster I went, so it could be the transmission because it didn’t matter what gear I was in. Something had let go in the rear end, but power was still going to both rear wheels. Couldn’t be an axle then, right?
I slowly and carefully drove the 1.5miles back home with my heart sinking every time I heard a “clunk” from the rear end. I get home around 11pm and decide to tear the car apart right there and then to find out what was wrong. I couldn’t sleep because I had no idea what was wrong. I decided to try taking the rear end apart. I’ve done it a few times, so I could handle it in the dark, right?
Ariel on jack-stands on the street in the middle of the night.
Well the axles proved to be too stubborn to pull out at midnight without lots of noise and angry neighbors, so I patched her back together and put her on the ground until I had time to take her apart during the day.
After working that morning (and a lousy night’s sleep), I pulled her into the backyard and proceeded to pull the axles and diff out. It went much easier when I wasn’t worried about the noise. What I found confused and terrified me.
That carnage you’re seeing? It’s one of the shafts that holds one of the spider gears in place. That shaft sheared and would slide out until it hit the ring gear. When that shaft, resting against the ring gear, encountered the pinion, terrible noises were made and the shaft would get knocked back into place.
It turns out that when I had my diff re-welded, my buddy neglected to weld each spider gear to the housing. That allowed one spider gear to shift under load & pressure, which eventually sheared the shaft it rode on. Even with this happening, I wasn’t upset about the job my buddy did when he re-welded the diff. It held up remarkably well for a long time through a lot of abuse. But it still sucked that it happened to fail.
So after cleaning out all the metal shavings, I had another friend weld that shaft to the housing. I figured if it didn’t slide out anymore, it couldn’t cause anymore problems, right?
Remember folks, use plenty of heat on hardened steel. The weld held for about 3 hours of city/suburbia driving.
This time my dad just burned out the shaft to eliminate it completely.
Then I had someone else re-weld where the cracks had formed, weld the gear to the housing, weld inside the hole to gear & housing, and just add a lot more filler just about everywhere else. (Sorry, no pics). So far, everything is holding together, even my partially chewed up pinion.
I hope this is the last time I have to park Ariel like this until I do something about replacing the rear end.
Um, yeah. Screw going anywhere today.
GTI piston
