Okay well here's the jist. For awhile I was haring a pop in the driverside front when stepping on the brakes or sometimes making a turn. Thought it was balljoint/steeringrack related. I have done my balljoints and swaybar bushings however and the noise remained. Oddly enough, the noise went away and immediatly after I noticed a noise sounded like a swaybar rattling. Although obviously it is not that. I looked under at the axle and noticed it was sloppy. The stubshaft was moving also. My question is...what does this mean? is my stubshaft bad, my cv joint, or a carrier bearing? how do I REMOVE the stubshaft?...would I have to take the diff apart? I've always been a Jeep guy so this is a new kind of front end for me... You'd have to know, also, I did the axle seal on the other side but when I went to take this side off, I had trouble getting this axle off so I just left it alone. Any input would be great!!

 

What about hub bearing?

 

What year is the truck?

 

Sorry, the truck's a 2003. 4x4 obviously. 130,000 miles
It's the driver side where all the noise has been and is coming from. And it's also the one that has play. Up and down play. Is my carrier bad? how would that happen?

 

If it didn't get enough grease it can cause it to wear out faster. I'm not familiar with the 2003, I don't know how their shafts are set up but I lost both of my have shafts about 150,000 because the boots had torn and dirt had gotten in and chewed them up.

 

The driver side stub shaft has a bearing behind the oil seal that may be bad causing the play in the shaft. A special tool that fits onto a 5-lb slide hammer is needed to pull the shaft. The shaft can also be removed by removing the differential cover and removing the E-clip. I had to replace my passenger side oil seal that was leaking and found removing the differential cover on my 2002 too difficult (very tight to get to upper bolts), so I purchased the special tool and did the loan-a-tool at Autozone for the slide hammer. The special tool and adapter cost about $150.