Kroil - the best penetrating oil
I overpaid for this can, I think it was 11-something bux at a gun show, but if it saves you half an hour under the greasy metal beast it’s totally worth it.
I don’t know what’s in this stuff, or why its not sold everywhere on the planet, or why people keep telling me that they no longer make the stuff because of EPA regulations, but it works. It seems to dissolve rust. It’s fully an order of magnitude better at penetrating than olde water displacing number forty.
Once I had to move a lot of studs off of an engine block to transfer them over to another block. I’m not exactly sure why the rebuilt block didn’t come with the whole 10 bux extra worth of studs. I would have even ordered and paid for them if I had the documentation that told me what I needed. If you ever do an engine swap, you will burn up an amazing amount of time running around to pick up this or that, but it’s not like I could have ran out and bought new studs at the local, convenient, 24 hour, metric weird hardware emporium. So I either had to reuse the studs I had, or overnight them from someplace like MSC (also recommended, a mecca of pure unobtainum).
I used the Kroil, let them sit for 30 minutes, and then put on double nuts locked together so I could back the stud out. The short story was that I got every single stud out intact for reuse.
Tonight, I tackled Toyota half shaft number 4. I should have tried the Kroil first, but I thought I had my magic mojo in the silver slapper I had rented. About to give up in frustration, I gave it the holy sprinkle drenching of Kroil, and stepped out for a brainstorming half mile hike. I attacked with the prybar when I got back and actually made some progress. I reattached the silver slapper and finally got the damn thing out. The bearing was rusted pretty well to the steel casting it was mounted to.
Besides hardware stores, lots of shooting supply mail order places carry it too. I’ve used both the liquid and the spraybomb cans and they work equaly well. Try Froogle.
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Extra tags, for Google’s sake: driveshaft, half-shaft, camry, repair
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Although it’s not a complete step-by-step, the driver’s side half-shaft was covered in my blog here.
