What is this leaking? CV joint grease?

[pipe welder one]

Dealer says I have two bad lower ball joints. I jacked my 04 xc70 up and tried to wobble tire N and S direction to tell me whether I had a bad ball joint and they felt solid. I do get a light clunk noise when turning and hitting bumps thought maybe some relevance to dealer speaking of ball joints. Hoping someone may enlighten me on the leakage.

[billr99]

Dealer says I have two bad lower ball joints. I jacked my 04 xc70 up and tried to wobble tire N and S direction to tell me whether I had a bad ball joint and they felt solid. I do get a light clunk noise when turning and hitting bumps thought maybe some relevance to dealer speaking of ball joints. Hoping someone may enlighten me on the leakage.

Well, you might have a bad ball joint, but what you are seeing in this picture is a leaking CV boot. I just replaced one that looked just like this. The boot had a very small tear in it, but at close to 100K kms on the axle it just wasn't worth the hassle of trying to just replace the boot. BTW, a boot kit is about $25 and its a real mess to change versus a rebuilt halfshaft at about $120 and an hour or so to changeout.

Cheers,

Bill

[n00bkiller944]

Where did you get your halfshaft Bill? OEM Volvo? If aftermarket how is it holding up?

[billr99]

Where did you get your halfshaft Bill? OEM Volvo? If aftermarket how is it holding up?

I was in a bit of a bind at the time as I had pulled the axle and needed to get the car back on the road ASAP so I ended up getting one from the local NAPA store. That was about 5000 kms or so ago and so far so good. I took a real good look at it before I put it in there and although rebuilt it did look to be done pretty well. Obviously that is just surface appearance but I went with a NAPA shaft when we had to do one on my son's VW TDI and that one has done well over 200K kms. With that kind of experience, I figured what the heck.

Cheers,

Bill