The Does Everything, but Sucks at Everything Build

I hope so, that's one of the compromises with the Currie 60. For the Currie 9" they have an in house truss that they can weld on and with the truss its likely stronger than their RockJock 60 III. For the Rockjock 60 III, they don't offer an in house truss. However, they offer one for another style of their axles, if someone wanted to truss a Rockjock III for a Tacoma, they just have to copy the design over.

 

Looks awfully naked under there

 

If I wasn't past the point of no return I am now.....

 

I have the twin truck but in 6 speed, nice build. Sub’d!

 

Slowly chugging along
Prepping everything for shock positioning

 

Well fuck me, first major fuck up, thankfully it's not mine

Kinda hard to put wheels on when the lip for the hub is the wrong size

 

If it's to big a machine shop should be able to put it in a lathe and turn them down.

 

Yeah, I'm going to go back to Currie tomorrow and have their machinists take a look at it. I'm hoping they will just be able to put it in a lathe and turn it down, but the bearing/backing plate is pressed on and I'm worried they may not be able to turn due to the interference.

Worst case scenario, I suppose I could put them back in the axle housing, hook up the driveshaft, engage the locker and have the wife spin the axles with the engine while I shave them down with a sanding pad

 

HAH! Absolutely not! There's enough photos of my stupidly broken offroad stuff out there, I don't need video out there of me doing ridiculous&goofy shit in my garage

 

Currie axle issue recap with photos.

Stock OEM axles have a lip with a shoulder protruding from the hub. The drum is aligned on the wider shoulder and the wheel alignment is aided by the portion that sticks out beyond the drum. The shoulder that the drum aligns on is about 108mm and the rest is supposed to be 106.1mm(my measurements are off by a tiny amount because mic'ing with 1 hand is hard)


The Currie axles do not have shoulder, they are the 108mm for the entire lip. With Toyota specific wheels that have the bore set at 106.1mm they simply won't fit.

 

http://www.fjcruiserforums.com/forums/#/topics/158051?page=1
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/2nd-gen-rear-axle-bearing-diy.246760/
If you think CVs are a pain to work with don't even bother with the rear axles.

I read a report that someone had success with "drop method" of getting the bearing off the shafts so I figured if that worked then it shouldn't take too much force to press them off. I drilled some holes in some 5/16" angle and straddled the backing plate and tried pressing them off. Nope, didn't work, just bent the shit out of the angle.


Looking back on it I didn't have anything to lose, I should have just tried the drop method but opted to do it the "right way" like others were doing and made a jig to press them off. I read another report of someone using an old damaged housing and making a SST for the job out of it. Fuck it, I had a bad housing so I chopped off one side, welded it to 5/8" plate, stuck it in a 50ton press and popped them off with that.




Comparison shots of the axles.


Also annoyingly, the studs Currie uses do not match the OEM studs, they have a larger OD for the knurled area. So if you have aftermarket studs you won't be able to transfer them over.

 

Might as well go with ARP studs....

 

I had them in the rear. I was going to reuse them and put them in the Currie axles, that's how found out the knurled diameters were different, I'll probably put them the front so they don't go to waste

 

TL;DR
if anyone is thinking about getting a Currie RJ60....
Just get the 1330 Yoke with the axle
Take the fucking drive shaft off the truck if you're going to do any work on it
You likely don't need to shorten the drive shaft

So after stopping by Currie on Thursday they had the unfortunate news that in order to turn the axle hubs down, I would have to remove the bearings from the axles. Well the idea of doing it myself while installed on the truck has grown on me so I've decided to do it myself which led me to a stupidity and laziness fueled self fulfilling prophecy.....

So I came into this project believing 100% that I would have to take the drive shaft to a shop to be modified since with the Currie RJ60 the pinion assembly is longer and higher, well it looks like no modification is necessary and if you order a OEM ujoint compatible yoke, you don't need to do anything to the drive shaft other than remove the last flange.

Figuring I would have to get some drive shaft mods done, when I ordered the axle I just went with their stock/recommended yoke which is the 1350 yoke. Needing to hook the drive shaft up to the pinion to spin the axle hubs I needed a way to adapt the 1330 size stock ujoints to the 1350 yoke on the axle so I started looking around and Spicer makes exactly what I need.

$43 Spicer 5-648X U-Joint Kit 1330/1350 Series (OSR)

Spicer 5-648X U-Joint Kit


Easy peasy and converts 1330 to 1350.

Well my lazy+dumb ass decided to try to remove and install this with the drive shaft still on the truck. Whooda thunk trying to hold a press and run an impact upside down and hold up the drive shaft up wouldn't work well? Needless to say, I ended up cocking the press and somehow fucking up the side of the yoke that I couldn't see. Still not even completely certain how I did it but yeah....


Whatever I thought, I was going to have to modify it anyway right? I started to take measurements to figure out how much it needed to be shortened since I now needed it to get fixed anyway.
I've got a V6 + Automatic + DCSB, any other configurations may have different numbers.

I took all measurements from the center of the ujoint to the center of the weld. With the slip joint fully compressed its around 9 1/16".



With the slip joint fully extended while still maintaining full spline contact the length is around 11 3/16"




And now for the lengths with the rear axle droop to bump....






With the shackles no longer moving back much and any movement was from the springs bending "UP" I went straight to full bump



So, apparently the shackles do a pretty good job at keeping the slip joint in check and it doesn't have much movement at all. Looks like I don't need to get the drive shaft shortened, so I fucked up my drive shaft and need to have it worked on for nothing.

 

Wicked build! Subbed!

 

have you gotten your axle hubs turned down to size? any updates on the truck getting back on all 4 tires?

 

Yeah it's back down on all 4. I found a even worse issue while I was sanding down the hubs, the brand new hubs/axles were visibly wobbling, Currie ended up giving me another set of axles since they were so fucked up. After I get off work tonight I'll throw an update since I'm done with everything for the most part.

 

So as I was doing this:

(as you requested @jberry813)

I noticed this:



The brand new axles Currie had given me had out-of-spec runouts.

Passenger side was .012" Radial, .007" Axial
This was so bad you could see it without looking closely

Driver side was .006" Radial, .005" Axial
Not as bad but if you looked carefully you could see it wobbling slightly

This turns into a shitty situation, since the bearings were already installed and cannot be reused (They may be reusable is you are removing them and putting them back on the same axle, but can't imagine why anyone would do that) So in order to fix the matter I would need new axles and bearings, not a cheap issue to resolve.

I contacted Currie about the axles and they dragged ass through the whole thing. I called them and explained the situation and I emailed them videos of the hubs wobbling, we played phone-tag for a couple days, I got busy with other things and let my pressure on them slip. Several days after first talking to them and not hearing from them I called them up and said I want to stop by and drop these axles off so we can get this situation resolved. I dropped them off probably a week or a little bit more after initial contact. I was partially dragging ass myself since I was worried that I somehow bent them myself or would be blamed for it and wasn't looking forward to the prospect of having to buy another several hundred dollars worth of bearings and axles. (Had an issue with fucked up Stoptech parts a couple months ago and they blamed me for the issue, even though it wasn't)

When I dropped them off, they said they hadn't seen anything like it and agreed that they couldn't think of anyway that I could have done it myself and was likely manufactured poorly. I followed up by asking how they machine those axles, and they responded that my set wasn't made by them, the only thing they did was some work on the splined end, they had out sourced another company to machine the hub side and never actually touched it themselves. They took the axles and said they would check them and get back to me.

A week went by and I didn't hear anything. I called them up and the guy that I was working with on the issue didn't seem to have an idea of what was going on with it, he said he thought they checked them but needed to look into it. A day or 2 later he got back to me and said they agreed with me they were fucked up and asked if I wanted to try and straight them out/re-machine them (I don't even know how they would have done that) Or get new axles, we went ahead and ordered new axles. 5 Days later they called and said they had the new axles and I could pick them up. It took a long time but they eventually made everything right. They issued me new axles, bearings, seals, yadda yadda.

Interestingly they got slightly different measurements for the runout, I'm not certain how they measured it with the bearings still pressed onto the shaft but they got these numbers:
Their passenger side measurements weren't as bad as mine.

But their readings on the driverside were a bit worse than mine


My growing axle collection:


While I was waiting for all this to get resolved, and after having a MIG welder for over a year I finally took some time and practiced trying to make pretty MIG beads with different weaves, too bad they didn't turn out less ugly on the truck (not that the practice beads were pretty either)