Front axle connection to tranny movement

[xirdneh]

When I grab the axle at the nearest point along side the tranny/diff and try to wiggle it up and down it seems to move a bit too much
This is the driver side axle. The other side has half the movement. I checked two other Tercels axles and they had half the movement.
Ordinarily i would not care but the seal was leaking a little and i have a vibration problem around 45 MPH.
I swapped tires (front to rear) with no change. (Tires are 6 months old)
everything else is tight (tie rods, steering "U" joint, ball joint, shocks etc) no wheel bearing noise
just for the heck of it i replaced the axle and seal
leak stopped but vibration still there
going to get front end align and tire balance next week (inner edges of front tires showed unusual wear)

just wondering about the extra wiggle of axle at tranny/diff

[Petros]

most likely cause is worn or sloppy spline shaft on the end of the cv axle. I can not imagine there is anything inside the diff that would move that much, and it is still drivable. So the movement must be contained in the axle itself. If you can replace the axle with a new one, not a remanufactured one, that would tell for sure it was the axle.

I have seen remanufactured axles where these splines were all beat up and worn, they do not replace them so they could have a lot of wear and sloppyness in them even if recently purchased if they are remanufactured axles.

[xirdneh]

the one i installed was re-man
would have had to "order" a new one and i did not want to wait for it
i had thought the same as you about new vs re-man
but what are the odds the re-man would be bad too?

[Petros]

the odds are good that the reman splines are worn and possibly the cause of the problem. Consider they are using axles that have alreay been run out, worn out, and have lots of hard road miles on them. At most they de-bur the splines, if they are worn out they do nothing to make the spline better. If the cores they get have worn out splines, that what the next customers gets too.

That is why I would not waste any money on reman axles again unless there was nothing else available.