Anyone on hear replace the front drive shaft before. I need to replace mine since one of the CVs went bad and was wondering how hard the swap is. Seems pretty straight forward but just wondering if their is anything too tricky or something I'm missing that would cause a problem. Thanks in advance!

 

So why are you replacing your drive shaft? The CV axle doesn't have nothing to do with the drive shaft. But if the U-Joints are bad you need to remove the drive shaft.

On a 1st Gen. it is not that bad at all to remove the drive shaft. I'm sure yours will not be hard to remove.

 

Actually the front driveshaft on my dakota a 2003 quad cab has a CV joint and a U-joint.

I've replaced my front driveshaft with a new one that has two U-Joints instead of a CV on one end.

Its a super easy job 6 bolts on one end and 4 on the other. half hour job. don't even need to jack up the truck.

 

I have a high-speed (>70mph) vibration in my shifter (5-spd, 3.9 V6) that I fixed once by replacing one of my rear driveshaft U-joints. 30000 miles later it's back, so I had both rear ones replaced again last week but the vibe is still there (they were "bad" according to the shop). I'm looking to replace the front, but am wondering if I can just pull that little sucker out of there and go test-drive to be sure that's what the problem is... Reason I ask is because I don't really feel any noticable play in the front shaft CV joint. Thanks for any opinions.
Patrick

 

Just for the record, you can pull just the front driveshaft - that was the source of my high-speed vibration.
Patrick