OT: what reman axles to buy for Camry?

[Robert K]

I'm getting ready to put a set of new axles in our 1997 V-6 Camry that has 140,000 miles on it. We have Advance Auto, Autozone and O'Reilly's parts store in our town. Can anyone out there provide a recommendation as to what brands of reman axles I should look for and also stay away from? Considering the labor plus the new alignment this is going to require, I'd like to do this only once. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Grace and peace,

Robert K
1991 535i

[Bill R.]

Robert, you don't have to realign it after changing the axles. On your car you remove the nuts that hold the lower ball joint to the lower control arm and then swing the spindle out of the way.

When you reassemble and tighten those nuts back up everything is just as it was, no alingnment needed.

I do a couple of axles a week typically and for the last year the autozone have been getting lousier and lousier. I would go with the Cardone ones from Advance, they almost always have new ends on the cardone units. The very best rebuilds i've found are Laycs from California but i don't think you can get them where your at. The Crown ones from Advance or Checkers haven't been as good a quality as they used to be but the Cardone are pretty consistent.

I'm getting ready to put a set of new axles in our 1997 V-6 Camry that has 140,000 miles on it. We have Advance Auto, Autozone and O'Reilly's parts store in our town. Can anyone out there provide a recommendation as to what brands of reman axles I should look for and also stay away from? Considering the labor plus the new alignment this is going to require, I'd like to do this only once. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Grace and peace,

Robert K
1991 535i

[Robert K]

I hadn't seen you on the board for a while. I'm glad you replied. I know you do quite a bit of work and probably have quite a bit more experience with replacement parts.

I'm probably going to let a friend of mine who owns a shop do the work. I think I could do the axles myself, but I believe I'm also going to have to replace at least the passenger side front hub and bearing. We've had a long-running problem with vibration in our Camry. I've tried my best to track it down and even enlisted the help of others. I finally got to thinking about it today and started wondering if I had a hub that was bent. So I lifted the front tires off of the ground and let the wheels rotate at engine idle speed. The passenger side tire wobbled from side to side a bit. I thought it could have been the wheel or a bad tire, so I switched the tire from the other side. Got the exact same wobble. So, I think I'm going to just go through the front end while she's down. It's got 141,000 miles and has the original axles, lower ball joints and wheel bearings. I may just replace all of these items and be done with it. Those darn 4 wheel alignments can get pretty expensive if you have to replace a front end part every now and again.

Thanks again for the help!

Grace and peace,

Robert K
1991 535i

[rickm]

I'm probably going to let a friend of mine who owns a shop do the work.

I barter out all of my heavy work. Needed to get brakes/rotors done last year before vacation. Didn't have time due to my 70h work weeks, so I approached my mechanic and asked for a barter. I replaced his network, he took care of my brakes. It ended up being an even swap for time, my only out of pocket was for beer.