I know there's a DIY out there but a few more photos couldn't hurt for anyone contemplating their own axle replacement. So I threw together this thread showing what worked for me. It should be obvious that you can cause yourself serious harm and damage to your car if you dont have some basic knowledge, so use any information here at your own risk.

This is a relatively stock 2000 civic si with CV boots that were leaking. Located in the rust belt.

I went with Raxles at $120 each side. Few more bucks than autozone or napa and took 1 week to ship, but its worth having a good set of axles that dont go bad every 6 months.

I sprayed all bolts with PB blaster two days prior to doing this work.

Jacked car up on both sides and lowered car onto jackstands.


It had been 4 years my axle nuts had been removed so I was expecting pain, but it only took 2 seconds to loosen them with my Cordless Dewalt DW059 impact wrench. Very cool. fyi, prior to loosening, I unstaked the nuts with a flat faced punch.



Removed cotter pins and lower balljoint castle nuts. Drivers side castle nut came off no problem, passenger side castle nut required 30 seconds worth of propane torch heat and then some hammering on the ratchet. No amount of sledge hammering on the LCA would break loose the lower balljoints. Instead i separated them by shoving my ratchet between the LCA and knuckle while the LCA is jacked up with a second jack. You definitely want to keep loosened castlenut on there when breaking this bad boy loose so you dont destroy the balljoint threads. Drop the LCA and BAM they pop loose. If you rip or destroy threads on the balljoint, expect much pain putting new balljoints in....consider having a spare joint on hand and know how to replace one if you cant have the car down for an extended period of time, I was lucky here.



I then removed the lower shock fork bolt at the LCA with the cordless impact and pushed the bolt out with a long screwdriver. Easy


Pulled knuckle up and out. Axle came out of the hub easily via light tapping on tip of axle.



Pryed out the inner passenger side joint from the transmission with a 10" prybar (maybe $8 at sears). Axle came out easily. No fluid came out.


I loosened the transmission fluid FILL plug at this point. Needed a breaker bar to do so and there's limited access when the passenger axle is installed.

At the drivers side I had to pry the axle off the halfshaft. This was tricky as it was stuck on there good and there's not a great place to pry. Tried a few things. What worked for me was using a long ratchet and a sledge hammer to hammer on the inner axle joint. ie, placed end of ratchet on joint, and then hammered on the other end of ratchet. I dont think you could get a good angle to hammer directly on the axle joint. Here's what it looks like out.


Here's a closeup of the removed passenger side inner joint in case you want to see how loose the snap ring was.


Reinstall was fairly easy. Lubed up axle splines with trans fluid and positioned the axle up through the shock fork. Connected the outer joint first and threaded on the axle nut by hand. Then positioned the inner joint into the transmission (or onto the halfshaft). Once I got the inner splines aligned I grabbed the knuckle and used it as a battering ram to pop the inner joint in.

Note on the drivers side I lubed up the portion of the inner joint that slides through the halfshaft seal to help with install.

Here's a photo of the passenger side inner joint once popped in.


From there I reconnected the balljoint and installed a new cotter pin. (lined up cotter pin hole via tightening only). Then loosely threaded on the fork bolt. Jacked up the LCA (to preload the fork bolt bushings) and finalized tightening. Yes, I used new hardware. At 11 years old I figure I'd splurge $15.


Had the wife stomp on the brakes and I torqued the axle nuts, in my case 135 ft-lb so I was lucky to have a big torque wrench. Staked the nut down.


Drained transmission via the square plug. Refilled through the refill hole with this. Took maybe 5 minutes.



Cleaned brake rotors with brake cleaner as I got grease all over them.

done, took her for a test drive and then had a beer in celebration of saving serious cash by doing this myself. Enjoy.

Note, all bolts were torqued to specs in the helms.

 

Nice.. great pix