Driveshaft refurbishment

[Kaz-kzukNA1]

Hi, all.

During my NSX Health Check Service, quite often, I found the damage to the driveshaft boot or grease splashed around the boot. Also, I can feel the loose movement of the internal parts when moving the shaft up/down/left/right.

I refurbished many drive shafts in the past and as I received similar questions about it, I decided to share the information with you. Please note that following procedures include the process not even explained in the Service manual and it is based on my own experiences. Therefore, it may not be suitable for your case.

Unlike other production cars, our NSX requires frequent maintenance on the drive shaft. My NSX is everyday car and it covered about 120,000miles in 15 years. I normally refurbish my drive shaft every 20,000miles. I don’t track my NSX as I have other cars for this purpose but even with this normal driving condition, the grease inside the drive shaft boot was getting soft.
If you track your NSX, it is better to service your drive shaft frequently especially if you have aftermarket header/exhaust.

When the grease is new, it looks like yellow/cream custard colour and very-very sticky. The grease will hold its original position inside the container even you place it up side down.

Quite often, I found damage to the boot like this one or lots of grease splashed around the boot even there was no damage to the boot. The grease got leaked from the side of the boot.


Because of the damage to the boot, lots of debris, water, etc could get inside the boot and thus, degraded the quality of the grease. Also, the grease will be leaking to the outside world resulting in loss of lubricant capacity.
If you ignored or didn’t notice the early sign of the damage/leakage, your grease will turn into very soft character and it would look like this. When you open the boot, some of the grease simply runs down like gravy or melted mocha ice cream…. Not a good sign as it has contaminated the grease inside the three rollers with lots of tiny roller bearing inside.