Originally Posted by Henn28

I took a break from my M62 rebuild (need to update that post for the one or two guys that care), and some long deferred home chores, to take care of an alignment and troubleshoot a left front CV boot that has been throwing grease for a year.

First, thanks to Factory6speed for some great guidance and lessons learned on the do-it-yourself alignment process with string and a ruler. All told, it seems to have worked great (I only did the front toe-in as my steering was off about 15 degrees left, to drive straight).

The right side was at 3mm toe -in so I eased it off one turn/ 1mm to get it to 1.5 mm. The left side was toed-in fully 6 mm, which I suspect was the majority of my right drift or left 20 degree steering wheel to go straight. 2.5 turns put it to about 1mm by my measurements for roughly 2ish mm total toe-in. A short test drive makes me optimistic that I got it right finally. A longer test drive on the highway will tell the story though.

Then it was up up on the floor jack and the right front came off. A good amount of grease, which I have been seeing for many, many months and just ignoring. The axle is a GKN and maybe 3 years old and I had noticed that the small clamp on the outer boot was loose when I inspected it a year or so ago and was the source of at least some of the grease. I tried to clamp the silly Oettinger clamp down more at the time, with limited success.

Today I found some cracking in all the boot creases but I didn't see any areas fully torn. That said, I suspect there are some small tears since there was a lot of grease all the way back to the hub. I cleaned it all up, cut off the clamp, jammed my grease gun under the small end of the boot and shot as much red and tacky as it would take into the joint. After it started squeezing back out of the small end, I put a screw clamp on it and wrenched it down.

Hopefully this will get me through the winter and hunting season so I can change the boot in the spring. As usual I didn't do this job when I had the hubs off a few months ago, and now I'm wishing I hadn't been in such a hurry to get the job done back then.