Front Drive Shaft Grease
A slick solution to greasing the front drive shaft!
Ongoing discussion about this article can be found by Clicking Here.
Original Writeup By applied_gravity
OK, after getting the word from multiple dealers that this grease fitting did not actually exist, and that the label under the hood was just one of those generic things that they put on all the trucks, but which really didn't apply to my model (some variation on this seems to be the standard response to this question!), finally bit the bullet this rainy weekend and spent an embarrassing length of time first finding this fitting, and then figuring out how to grease it... I'll try to pass on what I learned, and for a modest investment, you too can do be all set up to keep this thing lubed!
1) Finding the fitting will be your first challenge, it is really tucked way back up in there, and it is not at all obvious. The Chrysler documentation, ~identical in both the owner's and service manuals, sets the standard for Download Here - although it does provide reinforcement for the belief, before the personal discovery of any evidence to the contrary, that this thing both exists and does need to be lubed. Note to mods - this page from the owners manual is freely available on the chrysler website, and should also easily qualify under the "fair use" standard, hence no copyright infringment applies.
Even with the quite helpful, and often informatively illustrated discussions available on this site, e.g.
http://www.dieseltruckresource.com/dev/showthread.php?t=181267
http://www.dieseltruckresource.com/dev/showthread.php?t=124882
I still couldn't find the stinking thing, and almost lost faith that it did actually exist... fortunately I'm stubborn, and it was a pretty rainy weekend around here.... plus I knew that I'm smarter than a dealer mechanic!
After repeatedly driving the truck back and forth a few inches at a time (eventually getting pretty good at estimating what distance traveled converted to what angle of drive shaft rotation!), and peering over and over again at the cardan joint from different angles, and repeatedly comparing it to the pictures I'd printed out from here (an absolutely necessary, if not necessarily sufficient, step in the process), and trying to hold those printouts at the same angle as the driveshaft, and craning my neck back and forth while trying to see around corners, and scraping dirt/rust/whatever off of various possible locations... eventually I saw this tiny little dimple thing, set back around a corner in a hollow, that I eventually convinced myself really was the elusive grease fitting!
Trust me, it is not easy to see from a lot of angles, and impossible from many, but it is there! Pix are attached, showing the best shot I could get of the actual fitting (it's that shiny little spot in the inside of the forward-most yoke of the cardan joint, and of the fitting in relation to that end of the prop shaft coming out of the xfr case.
2) Your next trick will be to figure out how to grease it - The local NAPA was closed, so I tried the little needles, and went through a couple of them (at 5 bucks a pop at the local Schucks...), trying to make them work, including clipping of the pointed tip, bending to a custom angle, etc - while this provides adequate access to pump grease all around the fitting, I found the needle way too flimsy to allow sufficient pressure on the fitting to actually get any grease through the fitting, and eventually abandoned this approach (and the project for the evening...)
3) Working off my annoyance with a good dinner and a few shots, I had one of those brain-flashes (funny how the human mind works sometimes...) The little hand-held grease gun I use for greasing bicycle hubs/shifters/etc might just work - I immediately went down to the basement bicycle shop, dug it out, and crawled back under the truck... hot darn! Of course it was full of fancy white Italian bicycle grease, so I deferred the rest of the project in favor of a couple more drinks - one thing I've learned over the years in research, when you think things are going great, that's a great time to stop, and enjoy that feeling at least overnight!
Next morning I tried just pulling off long the needle fitting, and screwing it onto my hand-held compact grease-gun, but that still proved pretty unwieldy for getting up in there; after cleaning and refilling the gun, I decided that it is the perfect tool for this job! With the long extension, you can fit it up against the grease fitting with one hand, get it centered, push hard enough to get the grease to go where you want, and pump away! Double Hot Darn!!!
I've seen these little guns elsewhere, and for a bit less, but if you don't want to hunt around you can buy yours at our (newly local) mail-order bike shop, Branford Bike -
http://tinyurl.com/9cszs9
What you want is that little "Le Tour" grease gun and the 4" nozzle extension. (The extension has standard grease gun threads, but I found the gun itself so easy to use for this application that I'd recommend getting it as well.)
And after you've done this, and figured out how slick and easy it is to grease this thing now, spare a kind thought for us weanie bicycle riders in the tight shorts perhaps suggestive of questionable sexual orientation, and maybe cut us some slack next time you pass us by... oh, and if you're really up for a mechanical challenge, I'll let you work on rebuilding a Campagnolo integrated shift/brake lever someday - Dodge engineers may be grossly incompetent, but the Italians have many more centuries of being truly malevolent in their bloodlines!
Bill
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v372/iker42/fitting_overview.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v372/iker42/fitting_details.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v372/iker42/LeTour_to_the_rescue.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v372/iker42/LeTour_grease_gun.jpg
--Iker42 22:02, 15 January 2009 (EDT)
