Mobil 1 synthetic grease nlgi no 2 (1 Viewer)

[2001LC]

I pumped grease in today - 150,000 miles.

Old grease came out of the spider yoke seals.

No grease came out of the slip yoke seals and the shaft didn't extend. Instead, it started coming back out the zerk.

My shaft looked like it might have already been extended - there was a shiny area at the ends. Sorry for the quality of this picture, but arrow is to the shiny area:

View attachment 2009394

I ended up using nearly a whole tube of grease. The good news is that a squeak seems to have gone away.

Any thoughts on this, and what I should do next?

If vehicle raised rather than in neutral stance, propeller shaft slide yoke extends showing silver. If shaft is extended (silver showing) the cavity of slide yoke will have more room to hold grease. Then, when vehicle lowered to a neutral stance, excess pressure will build with in the slide yoke pushing on transfer case and differential(s).

Toyota 100 series FSW states: Add grease until new "grease is seen passing seal of yoke". Toyota has change their recommendation in the 200 series FSM (good for 100 series also): "add grease until slide yoke begin to extend". In either case, always lube propeller shaft in neutral position. Or, remove grease zerk from slide yoke, then lower vehicle back to neutral stance. Excess grease will come out grease zerk fitting as it's lowered. Then replace grease zerk.

 

[tjb]

Thanks. It was in neutral, much as I would have preferred wriggling around under there in high.

How do you remove a zerk? Wasn’t immediately obvious to me while staring them in the face.

 

[2001LC]

Since it was in "neutral height", the extension (silver) may be from excessive grease being pumped into camber of slide yoke. Some is just how much the slide yoke is moving during normal driving.

Just use a 7mm socket to turn zerk CCW. Don't break or cross-thread when installing to 5-7ft-lbf.

I do still pump in grease until it passes seal, in some higher mileage cases. They are general dry from not being lubed. In those cases seal condition is worn so grease will pass easily. I use a technique of pump in grease until I see it start to extend, then wait until it retracts and repeat as many times as it takes.

Mute your volume, air compressor is running LOUD!
I was in a bit of a hurry on this one. Barely any old grease came out of this one., indicating it's not been lubed regularly.

 

[Mbchance]

This is a good thread for greasing. More pertinent information here than in the Official Clunk thread when it comes to application, IMO.
@2001LC looks like you pumped a LOT in the video....

Is it still recommend by most here to pump until new grease oozes?
Or should the 200 series FSM be followed and only applied until expansion?

 

[FxFormat]

^^^You'll find lots of different answers from how people grease their slide yoke, and different type of grease. What I do is grease it with the truck on the ground, not on a lift, you don't want the yoke extended, you will be pumping like 50 pumps in there. I pump until old grease oozes out of the seal, have a good amount escape. Wipe off the excess grease then remove the zerks, it's just a 6mm and spin it off revealing a small hole. Now lucky for me i have an AHC truck, i cycle my suspension up and down a few times, some extra grease will ooze out of the zerk hole. After that i drive it around my neigborhood slowly, try to find dips and bumps to let the suspension flex some more. Come home, put the zerks in and then go have a beer, been doing it like this every other oil changes on my cruisers for years, no issues. I've heard that you can overgrease the slip yokes, and that it could put too much pressure on the transfer case during hard rebound and compression. Though i've never seen any damages of over greasing, it does make sense and it could happen so purge any of the extra grease you can.

For the spider joints, just grease it until all of the old grease comes out, shouldn't take much, 4-5 pumps and all the old grease would've purged out. You can't overgrease them, they just come out of the seal on their own.

 

[2001LC]

This is a good thread for greasing. More pertinent information here than in the Official Clunk thread when it comes to application, IMO.
@2001LC looks like you pumped a LOT in the video....

Is it still recommend by most here to pump until new grease oozes?
Or should the 200 series FSM be followed and only applied until expansion?

Whereas to really get lubed well, we like to see old come out. But that is risky. Seem Toyota felt to risky, so changed recommendation to first extension. Why they increased lube interval, to every other oil change. IMHO to reduce cost of ownership.

Anymore, I mostly pump in grease until first extension of yoke seen, 100 or 200 series.

If I've still a clunk, I'll pump until grease passes seals (extending no more than 1/8" each pump as seen in above video). I may even use a moly fortified. I may even go with NLGI #1 for one lube, in problem cases. Then switch back up to my NLGI #2 in subsequent lubes.

Some I've seen where the seals are shot, form never lubing. Those the grease pass seals too easy. So the clunk will return sooner 2k to 3K. These need more frequent lubing or replacing. Others, the whole assembly is like new, these I may extend lubing cycle to every other oil change.

Note: I don't use moly grease in spiders or any high speed bearings. I've heard with some of the newer greases it can be used but IDK so i don't.

 

[Mbchance]

^^^You'll find lots of different answers from how people grease their slide yoke, and different type of grease. What I do is grease it with the truck on the ground, not on a lift, you don't want the yoke extended, you will be pumping like 50 pumps in there. I pump until old grease oozes out of the seal, have a good amount escape. Wipe off the excess grease then remove the zerks, it's just a 6mm and spin it off revealing a small hole. Now lucky for me i have an AHC truck, i cycle my suspension up and down a few times, some extra grease will ooze out of the zerk hole. After that i drive it around my neigborhood slowly, try to find dips and bumps to let the suspension flex some more. Come home, put the zerks in and then go have a beer, been doing it like this every other oil changes on my cruisers for years, no issues. I've heard that you can overgrease the slip yokes, and that it could put too much pressure on the transfer case during hard rebound and compression. Though i've never seen any damages of over greasing, it does make sense and it could happen so purge any of the extra grease you can.

For the spider joints, just grease it until all of the old grease comes out, shouldn't take much, 4-5 pumps and all the old grease would've purged out. You can't overgrease them, they just come out of the seal on their own.

Yeah, I've been reading up on several threads regarding greasing procedures along with various editions of the FSM printout stating what to do. Seems as though the manufactures couldn't settle on the correct procedure either. I had a slight clunk every once in awhile in the rear upon acceleration from a stop. Since greasing, just enough until expansion, the clunk is gone. I only pumped maybe 10'ish times. I have no idea when the last grease job was performed. Still in the process of baselining the rig and making sure to baby everything accordingly. I'll play with it some more this weekend. Might pump it up several times to see if I can get the old grease to come out, then remove the zerk to give some relief. Thanks for the reply.

Whereas to really get lubed well, we like to see old come out. But that is risky. Seem Toyota felt to risky, so changed recommendation to first extension. Why they increased lube interval, to every other oil change. IMHO to reduce cost of ownership.

Anymore, I mostly pump in grease until first extension of yoke seen, 100 or 200 series.

If I've still a clunk, I'll pump until grease passes seals (extending no more than 1/8" each pump as seen in above video). I may even use a moly fortified. I may even go with NLGI #1 for one lube, in problem cases. Then switch back up to my NLGI #2 in subsequent lubes.

Some I've seen where the seals are shot, form never lubing. Those the grease pass seals too easy. So the clunk will return sooner 2k to 3K. These need more frequent lubing or replacing. Others, the whole assembly is like new, these I may extend lubing cycle to every other oil change.

Note: I don't use moly grease in spiders or any high speed bearings. I've heard with some of the newer greases it can be used but IDK so i don't.

I wanted to use the old KISS principal and decided on a Synthetic Moly..... Valvoline to be exact.. Decided to try that all the way around. NLGI #2. I'm wondering if I should switch to a lithium based grease for the spiders? Will it hurt anything otherwise?


Once again, I appreciate the response's from everyone. Knowledge here is unbelievable as well as the generosity with it.

 

[2001LC]

Short answer: I do not use moly in high speed bearings. Spider are high speed bearings.


____________________________


Many years ago I tried moly in our wheel bearings, a set that had some minor pitting. Moly can actually fill in fishers/pits in a "low speed" "Extreme pressure" (EP) bearing is what I learned at the time.

But I then learned that moly fortified grease retained more heat than grease without. The wheels bearings came out, not looking so good, a bit heat soaked. I switch back to M1 wheel bearing grease and bearings improved.

Moly in the slide yoke can help with stiction. But I don't think we've a stiction issue like some Fords & GM. But it is fine in the yoke regardless and may even get longer lasting results with moly than non.

Again this goes back 15 or 20 years. Newer grease with moly may be different IDK. Some say they can be used in high speed app IDK.

 

[LndXrsr]

This is a good thread for greasing. More pertinent information here than in the Official Clunk thread when it comes to application, IMO.

Completely agree, much more useful than many other threads about this topic. Would personally nominate some portion of it, probably @2001LC 's description and video to be in the FAQ as, although it's not complicated, there's much discussion about this obviously and pics and videos are tremendously helpful. The current FAQ thread has only an image of the FSM diagram.

I just spent portions of the last two days lubricating my slips and spiders using a combination of recommendations that I think may be a useful compromise between the "grease until you see it coming out the seal" and the "stop when you see expansion of the slip" crowds.

Of note, mine is a 2000LX with AHC still functional. Did this in the N setting. Used WD-40 Specialist True Multipurpose grease which is a dark blue and is NGLI-2 rated, but also has some marine-grade water resistance qualities. Also perhaps important, I didn't really have clunk before all this, and Lexus records tell me this car was probably lubed pretty regularly.

I started by justing pumping in a TON of grease into both slip yokes and a hand pump. Took ~50pumps in each one to see any expansion at all. It would then slowly settle as you can see in the video in this thread. Continued pumping and it took 75-100 pumps total to start seeing some grease weep around the seal as you can see here:

Following that, I drove the car very minimally, nothing rough, and for maybe 5-10 minutes max. Then let it sit overnight so that the weight of the car alone could slowly push any grease out the seal without being abusive to the diffs, etc. This morning, I rechecked, not much change, if any, in the amount of grease seeping past the seal.

I interpreted this finding as that there was still a lot pressure in the slip yoke itself, and so I removed the zerks as is occasionally described around here. I got a small amount back by natural pressure release, front and rear.

I then raised and lowered the AHC from H (working under car) --> L --> H (back to working under car) with the zerks out. I thought this wouldn't make much difference as the driveshaft angle doesn't change much since both the TC and diffs raise/lower with AHC, albeit slightly different amounts. But I did get a fair amount of grease out both front and rear.

Front:

Rear:

After cleaning that grease snake off my floor, I put the zerks back in. No driving with the zerks out. My thinking being that would force a lot of grease out through repeated unpredictable movement of the driveshaft in/out and probably leave them under-lubed. Probably would be fine, but hey, you're reading my approach, this is how I did it.

I should say, my zerks were neither 6 nor 7mm nor SAE. Had to use locking pliers to carefully get them off and was gentle putting them back on with a 7mm socket that was a bit loose. Didn't use my torque wrench for fear of rounding them off, and 5lb-ft is next to nothing anyway.

So with all that, I now know that I got a ton of grease in the slips, which I feel they needed badly. I got enough to come out the seal and also let the car rest in an attempt to have the seals naturally release any excess grease. When they didn't, I then released the pressure by removing the zerks and cycling the suspension, so I also now feel comfortable that there isn't any hydrolock or excess pressure in there.

Best of both worlds? We'll see what I find at the next lube point in a few thousand miles.

 

[liveoak]

As far as I'm concerned, the only way to do it right is to remove the driveshaft, mark it, pull out the slip yoke, clean it well (as this is the only way you'll know that your actually getting new grease on every spline), grease it by hand, put it back together.
Now you can grease it again through the zerk if you wish.
This seems like the preferred method on the 4runner forums as they suffer from the "thud" as well on certain models. A few of them only apply the grease by hand and then drill out the little zerk hole to help relieve the pressure buildup.

 

[shiretowndown]

Pump more! The sound and movement are good. Pump it until the shaft raises at least an inch or so. Clean the area where the yoke slides with a mild solvent (I like WD40) or even a penetrating oil like PB blaster.

Then I'd drive it but you could just let it sit a few hours and then pull the zerk again since it sounds like you have hydrolock concerns. Keeping that grease under pressure should push the oil into the junk.

Give it a few more weeks to allow the oil in the new grease to seep into the old dried up grease and make it pumpable.

Until you get flow you could try using a #1 or #0 grease. It has a greater oil/thickener ratio so more oil to seep into the accumulated junk.

@NMuzj100 says here:

~“clean the area where slide yoke travels (shiny part) with WD-40 or PB Blaster”

@2001LC says:

“Additionally he recommends cleaning and priming outer rim of seal. This is excellent advise. Once cleaned & primed, I found great trick.”

Question #1: So a good initial step is to spray some PB Blaster on shiny area at slide yoke and in toward seal to begin “seal softening”?

Question #2: Wouldn’t a good next step be to use AHC and adjust vehicle to H then really coat extended shiny area with your grease of choice (I’m thinking of trying Green Grease) then lower vehicle down to L thereby lubricating rubber yoke seal from opposite direction?

I would be interested to see if I am thinking about the common issue discussed here correctly.

 

[LndXrsr]

@NMuzj100 says here:

~“clean the area where slide yoke travels (shiny part) with WD-40 or PB Blaster”

@2001LC says:

“Additionally he recommends cleaning and priming outer rim of seal. This is excellent advise. Once cleaned & primed, I found great trick.”

Question #1: So a good initial step is to spray some PB Blaster on shiny area at slide yoke and in toward seal to begin “seal softening”?

Question #2: Wouldn’t a good next step be to use AHC and adjust vehicle to H then really coat extended shiny area with your grease of choice (I’m thinking of trying Green Grease) then lower vehicle down to L thereby lubricating rubber yoke seal from opposite direction?

I would be interested to see if I am thinking about the common issue discussed here correctly.

I considered this also, but get a little wary of what WD-40 and PB Blaster can do to rubber. Also, the amount of travel in the slip yoke with changing the AHC height is not much. I think most driveshaft travel comes from suspension movement while driving. Remember that the diffs also go up and down a good amount when changing the AHC height along with the transfer case, so there is only a slight change in slip yoke angle and therefore driveshaft length.

 

[shiretowndown]

I found this on the FAQ section of the PB Blaster website:

I would like to think our yoke seals are “higher density” and we could have no idea.

This brings up a good question, is there a spray lubricant similar to an NLGI #00 or #0 that we could attack the seal from the outside slide yoke area with?

 

[2001LC]

@NMuzj100 says here:

~“clean the area where slide yoke travels (shiny part) with WD-40 or PB Blaster”

@2001LC says:

“Additionally he recommends cleaning and priming outer rim of seal. This is excellent advise. Once cleaned & primed, I found great trick.”

Question #1: So a good initial step is to spray some PB Blaster on shiny area at slide yoke and in toward seal to begin “seal softening”?

Question #2: Wouldn’t a good next step be to use AHC and adjust vehicle to H then really coat extended shiny area with your grease of choice (I’m thinking of trying Green Grease) then lower vehicle down to L thereby lubricating rubber yoke seal from opposite direction?

I would be interested to see if I am thinking about the common issue discussed here correctly.

#1; I'd just use grease.
#2, sure or just drive.

 

[dealmaker]

So...is Mobil 1 synth #2 good to go? Or is the recommendation to use Valvoline Dura-something? Or stick with using two separate greases, one for spider and the other for slip?

 

[6H05T]

Completely agree, much more useful than many other threads about this topic. Would personally nominate some portion of it, probably @2001LC 's description and video to be in the FAQ as, although it's not complicated, there's much discussion about this obviously and pics and videos are tremendously helpful. The current FAQ thread has only an image of the FSM diagram.

I just spent portions of the last two days lubricating my slips and spiders using a combination of recommendations that I think may be a useful compromise between the "grease until you see it coming out the seal" and the "stop when you see expansion of the slip" crowds.

Of note, mine is a 2000LX with AHC still functional. Did this in the N setting. Used WD-40 Specialist True Multipurpose grease which is a dark blue and is NGLI-2 rated, but also has some marine-grade water resistance qualities. Also perhaps important, I didn't really have clunk before all this, and Lexus records tell me this car was probably lubed pretty regularly.

I started by justing pumping in a TON of grease into both slip yokes and a hand pump. Took ~50pumps in each one to see any expansion at all. It would then slowly settle as you can see in the video in this thread. Continued pumping and it took 75-100 pumps total to start seeing some grease weep around the seal as you can see here:
View attachment 2296347

Following that, I drove the car very minimally, nothing rough, and for maybe 5-10 minutes max. Then let it sit overnight so that the weight of the car alone could slowly push any grease out the seal without being abusive to the diffs, etc. This morning, I rechecked, not much change, if any, in the amount of grease seeping past the seal.

I interpreted this finding as that there was still a lot pressure in the slip yoke itself, and so I removed the zerks as is occasionally described around here. I got a small amount back by natural pressure release, front and rear.
View attachment 2296360

I then raised and lowered the AHC from H (working under car) --> L --> H (back to working under car) with the zerks out. I thought this wouldn't make much difference as the driveshaft angle doesn't change much since both the TC and diffs raise/lower with AHC, albeit slightly different amounts. But I did get a fair amount of grease out both front and rear.

Front:
View attachment 2296368

Rear:
View attachment 2296369

After cleaning that grease snake off my floor, I put the zerks back in. No driving with the zerks out. My thinking being that would force a lot of grease out through repeated unpredictable movement of the driveshaft in/out and probably leave them under-lubed. Probably would be fine, but hey, you're reading my approach, this is how I did it.

I should say, my zerks were neither 6 nor 7mm nor SAE. Had to use locking pliers to carefully get them off and was gentle putting them back on with a 7mm socket that was a bit loose. Didn't use my torque wrench for fear of rounding them off, and 5lb-ft is next to nothing anyway.

So with all that, I now know that I got a ton of grease in the slips, which I feel they needed badly. I got enough to come out the seal and also let the car rest in an attempt to have the seals naturally release any excess grease. When they didn't, I then released the pressure by removing the zerks and cycling the suspension, so I also now feel comfortable that there isn't any hydrolock or excess pressure in there.

Best of both worlds? We'll see what I find at the next lube point in a few thousand miles.

Excellent visuals! I will be doing this soon.

 

[LXKevin]

Since it was in "neutral height", the extension (silver) may be from excessive grease being pumped into camber of slide yoke. Some is just how much the slide yoke is moving during normal driving.

Just use a 7mm socket to turn zerk CCW. Don't break or cross-thread when installing to 5-7ft-lbf.

I do still pump in grease until it passes seal, in some higher mileage cases. They are general dry from not being lubed. In those cases seal condition is worn so grease will pass easily. I use a technique of pump in grease until I see it start to extend, then wait until it retracts and repeat as many times as it takes.

Mute your volume, air compressor is running LOUD!
I was in a bit of a hurry on this one. Barely any old grease came out of this one., indicating it's not been lubed regularly.

I like that pulsing method. Which grease are you running these days?

 

[2001LC]

Mobil One. I rarely use the pulse method any more. Except in very difficult cases. Typically, I just pump in grease until first sign of extension.

 

[6H05T]

Anyone use Lucas Red n Tacky #2 on their driveshafts?
Lucas Red "n" Tacky #2

 

[tjb]

Someone reacted to an old post of mine in this thread in which I said I was having trouble getting the drive shaft to extend.

For future searchers, I thought I’d say that I’ve since done this many times, and I think I followed @2001LC ’s advice (in another thread?) to pump it in until the shaft moved, wait a bit for it to return, and then repeat. Eventually the grease started to come through as it should, and it has done so readily every time since.