Installing new front drive shaft

[RocketyMan]

Wanted to post this for you guys and share changing out my front drive shaft. My recent mod made me re-evaluate the condition of the splines of the front DS and the possibility of a break-down in the event of the splines fully stripping out. Now my X roughly has 190k miles on her and think this is a worthy part to replace for reliability.

Ideally it would be great to change out the Xcase drive splines as well, but changing a drive shaft is much easier. The shaft costed about $120 shipped. It was nice to see the drive shaft have balancing weights installed visually indicating it was balanced.

I used moly based grease on the splines to help aid in sliding action of the two parts and to maintain rust prevention. The main concern would be excess play between the mating of the two parts.

Changing the drive shaft is pretty simple. All it took was jacking up the car, removing the reinforcement plate, removing the 3 fasteners on guibo/3 fasteners on DS flange. Then to gain access using a screwdriver in between guibo and DS flange to "wedge" the DS back further towards Xcase. Once adequate clearance made, the guibo was able to be removed, thus, allowing enough clearance to fully remove driveshaft out.