Today I changed the drivers side half shaft on a 98 Sable. It was a real PIA. I thought it was going to take a couple of hours at the most. Well it took 4 hours with two trips to the parts store. The biggest problem I had was the Lower Ball Joint did not want to seperate from the Lower Control Arm. My pickle fork was not thick enough and I installed a pitman arm puller and the ball joint would not budge and I ended up damaging the first few threads on the ball joint stud. Then I tried two pickle forks together for a thicker wedge and that did not work. I tried adding heat with the Pitman arm puller that did not work. Finally I used the pitman arm puller to tighten up against the ball joint stud and installed the pickle fork on the top of the pitman arm puller (Gave some extra thickness) and a few good whacks with a big *** hammer and it finally broke loose. The next difficulty was getting the Lower control arm off of the ball joint stud. It took a 4 foot long pipe to provide enough leverage to lower the LCA enough to get the stud out. I rented the puller from autozone but the motor mount bracket was in the way and prevented me from installing it. I did manage to get a pry bar against the transmission and the half shaft finally broke loose. Re-assembly was pretty straight forward. But the 4 ft pipe was needed to get the ball joint stud back into the Lower Control Arm. I ended up using my cut off tool to grind the damaged threads off and had to jack up the LCA to seat the stud so it would not turn while tightening the Nut for the ball joint stud. Glad it is done.

 

thanks for the info on that job.

my sister-in-law was asking me what it would be for me to change the same shaft on her '99 Taurus wagon.

 

The link below from taurus forum is what I followed to replace the shaft. I did not use either trick 1 or 2 but used about 4 ft long pipe between the opening in the rear of the lower control arm and the sub frame. It worked very well. You could even cut about a little off of the ball joint stud before removing the nut and this would be a whole lot easier. During the install the ball joint stud wanted to rotate. Putting the floor jack under the control arm seated the ball joint stud and I was able to tighten the nut without the stud turning.

http://www.taurusclub.com/forum/82-m...placement.html