Agree with all of this with a tiny bit to say about the part in red. At 160,000 I decided to have a look at mine and pulled both shafts. All four u-joints were in top running condition with no problems.
Unfortunately the race mechanic side of me decided they were a wear item and I should replace them before they failed on a trail. I replaced them with some NAPA u-joints and then replaced them again 15,000 miles later when two of those failed. So I removed parts that were fine and replaced them with inferior parts that damm near instantly failed, yeah great plan. Currently all four are Dana-Spicer units and 35,000 miles later are running fine. I do like that the D-S units are greasable but who knows maybe the OEM Nissan units would still be going fine at 212,000.
Taking into account everything above, if it were me I would still replace them. The OEM Nissan u-joints on the Xterra were never meant to be serviced and I believe they specked out a fairly rugged u-joint to fill that job. However on my truck at least there was no way in hell you were going to replace a failed OEM u-joint on the side of a trail and that may also be tied to the original non serviceable design. I did a stint as a boat mechanic for a few years and have replaced dozens of failed, shattered, corroded u-joints in stern drives so replacing these was not my first rodeo.
My truck had up to that point never seen road salt and not a spec of rust on the undercarriage. It took all the force I could generate with a 20 ton H press and a map gas torch to get the caps to pop out and once popped I found that there was not enough room to physically remove the u-joint. I ended up having to remove some metal with a rotary porting tool from the forging edge on all of the yokes to gain the clearance needed to remove the joint. Maybe it's unique to my truck or maybe the early 2000 models but you could not physically remove the joint body.
Once clearanced I had no problems removing Nissan joints, installing the crap NAPA joints, or removing the NAPA ones and installing the D-S units. I did however take the shafts and have them re-balanced even though the amount of metal being removed was fairly small, on mine it was almost like casting flash that was removed.
I did not have any of the issues RacerXXL had. I was able to press mine out and back in with an arbor press. I was able to take two of the bearing caps off of each u-joint to be able to remove them from the drive shaft. The biggest pain was reinstalling them in reverse order making sure the pin bearings stayed in place while seating & pressing the bearing cap in place. I bought an extra u-joint since I knew I would mess up atleast one bearing cap & pin bearings.
If you think they need to be replaced I would do it. My husband just replaced the U joints on our truck, and you could immediately tell the difference. The ride was a lot smoother, and we started getting and we started getting better mileage out of the gas.
Be careful to clean any fingerprint smudges on the brake pad when you put the wheel and all back on. He accidentally touched ours, and it made an alarming squeal. He Went back with brake cleaner, and it was fine.
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