[oljeeptek]

Originally Posted by Kderski

Ive got a question I was hoping someone would be able to answer for me on these boards. I have a 99 JGC Laredo with about 92k miles on it. Recently after driving for a period of time, I started noticing a horrible ticking noise coming from underneath, if I drive past a wall or parked car, I can hear a metal on metal noise. I took it into my mechanic tonight and we had it up on the rack and he showed me that the noise was comming from the front drive shaft. He preceded to explain that that model you cant get inside of the shaft to replace any of the joints etc like you could on the older models and that the entire front shaft will neeed to be replaced at a cost of about $570 dollars including labor.

Ultimately my question is this, is it in fact true that once somethings bad in the shaft the entire thing needs replaced? or could this just be a case of him not really knowing what he is talking about and maybe it just needs some of the parts inside replaced? Thanks in advance!

The facory may not sell parts for repairing the shaft, but you should be able to have most repaired at a custom driveline shop, such as Driveline Specialties etc. Look in your local phonebook for offroad suppliers. They can sometimes build you a complete repairable shaft for less than a new unit. They aren't hard to R & R either.