So see this awesome looking Dodge at the shop.

Great looking but, What happened to this old Dodge? We had been told it has a new transmission that had been rebuilt and put into the car not long before it was put up for sale.

In other words, I knew What happened to this old Dodge before anyone else did. That was a key thing to me at least as I had always thought that something like this could happen after seeing older Mopars being worked on.

It would seem that the older Plymouth, Dodge and Chryslers had an interesting rear axle setup. Why they would do this is beyond me but, they had a hub that had a keyway in it. Then a woodruff key would be installed and the hub would be torqued on with a big nut and cotter pin to hold the hub on and the brake drum would sit over that.

when someone worked on this car it seems that they forgot to put some parts back into the rear when they did some kind of work on it like brakes or something? When they put it back together they left out some studs but, worse yet is they didn’t torque the axle nut correctly. Then whoever drove the car sheared the key and the axle spun in the hub. They then thought the trans was slipping and had that rebuilt before we became owners of the car. It made it back to the shop before it finally let loose completely and couldn’t even move forward because the axle was just spinning in the hub destroying both units.

Luckily we had another complete rear axle for parts in another barn so it was able to be cannibalized for parts in this car. Of course, we had to borrow a large slide hammer to pull the axle out so the entire side could be replaced but, now the car has a rebuilt transmission that it really didn’t need as that was not the problem 🙂