[0:00]Flippus here from Seriously Series and welcome to another Top Tip video. This one's gonna have a little bit more of a story flair to it today. Uh as I've been doing some work on the front axle assembly of the Land Rover Series 3, but in doing so it's uh evoked some memories, some crises, and some uh blanked out stories and sagas within myself in regards to rear axles. And what do you do if your your rear axle actually snaps in your four-wheel drive vehicle? There's some things you should do, but there's a lot of things as always that you shouldn't do. So, I'm gonna share with you here today some of the things that I've learned over the years, and uh the snapping great episode that actually happened to me uh a couple of years ago too.
[0:51]So if you want to find out this and more, as always, you know, exactly what to do. Click on that subscribe button down below. Click on that notification button too. And if you're already enjoying this video, and you can't wait to get through the promo, give it a thumbs up, makes all the difference. Anyway, sit back, relax, grab yourself a brew or something slightly stronger as we've got a cracking good yarn coming your way. Anyway, stay tuned.
[2:11]And that's it.
[2:17]All over.
[2:22]I've never ever snapped an axle before in 10 years. So, yeah. Uh so today, this video was sort of inspired, as I said, by the work I was doing on the front axle. Um but also, I've been very surprised, it's something that's happened or I've been made aware of over the last probably couple of years or so. And it's actually with the 70 series Land Cruiser. Uh I've been quite shocked that um you know, they they actually snap axles. Uh and it's it's seems to be quite a, I wouldn't say a common occurrence, but it it seems to happen quite regularly. Uh and everything in the drivetrain is just made of uh Swiss cheese. But for many, many years I've I've driven the Series 2, and I've actually never ever snapped an axle in the Series 2. Never. And when it came to actually purchasing the Series 3 here and getting it ready to go in the Canning Stock Route, um, yeah, I thought, well, there's there's no chance I'm going to snap an axle. I've never snapped one before. Uh the testaments and the stories that I'd heard over the years was of people putting, you know, ridiculous loads of wood in the back of their Land, uh not Land Cruiser, Land Rover, um, and having whizbang Holden motors and Falcon engines and Valiant engines in the vehicle, and working the pull transmission to an inch of its life, and bouncing up a hill and then, for some reason, they they snapped an axle. And my sort of overall driving style and ethos with these vehicles isn't probably as fast and certainly, um, maybe not as furious. So I thought the chances of actually snapping one were pretty remote. Well, you know, never assume, never presume. And this will be a little bit of a spoiler for some of you, but anyway, you you can't save everyone. Uh Damon and I were out in the middle of the Gibson Desert on a trip, and, we've been having absolute uh hell of a time, and and not in the good expression. It was it was hell. Uh, it was very, very difficult, it was very much character building. Um, I learned a lot about myself and grew a lot as a person from it, and we finally were starting to make headway and success. And the track was becoming more and more demanding upon the vehicles. Uh it was getting much hotter, it was getting into sort of the low to mid-40s degree centigrade, and uh, the track itself wasn't going straight over the sand dunes, it was weaving up and over. And I'd become crook from having some rather dodgy water that hadn't been treated, and I was in another vehicle and Damon was driving. And Damon's very good at driving, he's very, um, mechanically sympathetic to vehicles. He certainly doesn't flog them or thrash them in any way, shape, or form, but he does know how to get every pit pony of power out of them. And anyway, he was driving the Series 3, and he got up to the precipitous or the top of one of the sand dunes, which had uh a bit of a chicane to it, and he actually did a uh double clutch down change into first gear.
[6:44]And release the clutch, and there was an almighty bang from the driver's side, and mud literally shot out sideways, uh as he described to me later on. Anyway, uh, Damon got out of the car, he went around the back and investigated, and, uh, Damon's not one to really mix his words at all, and, uh, he was, I walked up the sand dune and, uh, said, you know, what's going on? And, uh, Damon was pretty concerned, and he thought he'd snapped an axle, and me, I guess, trying to be the optimist, said, oh no, I'm sure it's something else. So we reversed the Series 3 down the sand dune, which in itself was a interesting experience, because, with Damon putting it, no, with myself putting it into reverse, the front passenger side wheel, uh, lost traction and shot a massive roost of sand up that covered the car. And it was sort of at that point that I felt that something really wasn't right in the drivetrain. So we ended up actually having to push it, physically push it, uh, under its own power off the sand dune in reverse. Now this was after about midday, and we basically pulled off the side of the track, put the awning up and sort of assessed what we were actually going to do. And, and, uh, we had all these grand notions that, uh, a friend of mine would come out and deliver, uh, the an axle for us. And he said he would, but he was busy at work doing something else. Uh, we thought maybe there was a community nearby or settlement that had a few old Land Rovers kicking around because that's what we'd sort of found in the past. Anyway, that didn't prove to work out, there was one but it was two days drive away, and they couldn't discern whether it was a Discovery 1 or whether it was a Series 3 Land Rover, so I don't think they really knew their Land Rovers that well, and that's no criticism on them, it's just a interesting observation. And so, with that, um, we then started sort of pulling the vehicle apart. And this is something that I think really made made all the difference for us. Um, we pulled the passenger side axle out, uh, driver's side axle out because that's where the bang had come from. And unbeknownst to us, uh, the axle had actually snapped, but the way it had actually snapped was really interesting, it wasn't a clear break, it was almost like a piece of toffee, it just sort of, um, turned and then just tore off. And you could actually see, uh, around the sort of, I guess, the outer circumference of the the axle itself, that there was not rust, but you could see where the the iron had sort of oxidized a bit, where there had been a fatigue fraction, and it just got worse and worse. And probably the, I wouldn't say the shock, but maybe just down changing into such a low gear, um, mind of probably pushed it too far most likely. Uh and that would have would have been probably the cause of the, uh and was the cause, sorry, of the actual, uh, demise of the axle. But what we decided to do next, um, was really, really seemed very self-explanatory at the time, but I've been quite, not not shocked, but quite, um, surprised that other people don't do this. And that is, we actually removed the driver's side axle, we then removed the passenger side axle, and then we removed the rear prop shaft. So the vehicle or Series 3 essentially became two-wheel drive in front wheel. And the reason why we did that was because, um, you know, it's front wheel drive, uh, it's open differential, sorry. So the power is always going to go to the wheel with the least resistance, so it wouldn't really work that well even if we left the the axle in. The other thing was is all the, uh, swarf or the fragments from the actual the axle actually snapping, we didn't know what how much of that was actually in the actual, uh, oil of the differential itself. And driving it, um, you know, it it was just going to destroy crown wheels and pinions, and bearings and all the rest, and we were just going to be in more world of hurt than anything else. So I think isolating your rear differential is, uh, absolutely essential. Uh in doing it, and it doesn't matter whether it's a a Salisbury axle or whether it's a a Rover type, I think it's absolutely critical. With these vehicles, it's quite easy, you can just simply, um, drive it as in four high range, and, uh, you you're sorted, and obviously you can still use low range too. Um for your Defenders, and your Counties, and your 110s and 90s, and disco one and twos, you've simply got to engage your center diff lock, and then you can simply drive on your front differential. And we drove, not only did we get out of the sand dune system, which was very difficult struggle, because, uh, you know, we were now only two-wheel drive as opposed to four-wheel drive. Um, and we then had to negotiate a very difficult road to get out of there, which was a good couple of hundred K's. But we then had to drive another sort of close to 1,000 km to actually get back to, um, to Ka. So we did, you know, a reasonable amount of kilometers just on the front differential. Um, no, no, sorry, we only had to do 200 km because we got to Newman and then we replaced the axle in the rear. But anyway, what I was trying to get out is you can get yourself out of trouble and you can get to the place that you need to go. So, and, you know, the I guess the most important thing with the story is, take the time. You know, take the time to study your workshop manual, isolate that differential, and then you can save your diff for another day. Because when we actually got to Newman, and we're in the caravan park, um, I was actually able to take the snapped remains of the axle actually out of the diff itself by just using a flat-bladed screwdriver and pushing it through the differential. And now Damon's got that part of the axle and I've got the the longer part here in the uh the Landy Cave. So, you know, did that, got an axle sent up in the post to the post office, put it in, off we went, and that was it. We didn't have to rebuild differentials, we didn't have to pay thousands of dollars. I think a new axle cost maybe $100, $150 Australian, wasn't wasn't much at all, and uh that got us home. So anyway, I just thought this might be a video of interest, another top tip, another piece of information to keep, you know, squirreled away back there in the back of your head, uh just in case it happens to you, a friend, or who knows? It's just good to know these facts just in case it happens. So, yeah. But anyway, I better get back to work and pull out this front differential and, uh, yeah, we'll catch you in our next video. And if you've enjoyed this little story and top tip, then, uh, please do support Seriously Series on Patreon, it makes a big, big difference. It gets Dr. Google interested, it gets YouTube interested, but more importantly, it helps YouTube to recommend this video to other people like yourself, who might find this of interest too. So anyway, I'll see you in our next video. Catch you then.
