If the balls are not scored on any surface and beginning the downslide of
pitting then breaking down on the wear surface you are likely still in good
shape. If the race grooves also do not have any pitting yet but just a
polished surface you are also fine to reassemble and grease up the joint.

The joints will run many miles even when pitted and breaking down the
surface, many on the road right now are running this way, they will
eventually fail but its kind of a slow process till the end when there is a
steep fall off of the surface.

I have heard you can extend mileage by reversing the drive direction of the
joints thereby putting the load on the other sides of the race, turning 1/3
also would do similar.

full clean, flush, repack with moly fortified grease is the best thing you
can do for cv's. that and the boot intact.

Doug

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike South" <msouth@GMAIL.COM>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2011 9:24 PM
Subject: grooves in outer part of cv joint--replace?

> Hi,
>
> I have a cv joint apart (not because there was a problem, I swapping to
> manual-size axles because I'm converting my AT to manual [btw automatic
> transmission plus the stuff you need to convert (like shifter, etc) for
> sale, contact me off list]).  I'm on my third one, and when I was wiping
the
> grease off of the outer part of the joint I noticed grooves running
> perpendicular to the groove that is supposed to be there.
>
> It actually looks quite a bit like this shot from Ben's cv maintenance
> writeup:
>
> http://www.benplace.com/images_westfalia/assembling2.jpg
>
> However, you can't tell from that picture if that's just a "highly
polished"
> area or an actual little groove you can feel with your finger.  Mine has
> grooves you can feel when you run your finger down the groove in the outer
> race.
>
> The inner race looks fine, all surfaces smooth, and the balls look ok.
>
> Should I replace this joint, or is that normal wear and not worth worrying
> about?  I have the joints from the donor van available, so I might find
one
> of them without any blemishes (haven't disassembled them so I don't know
> yet).  In other words, I might not have to order a joint, in case you were
> factoring price into the answer.  Is it worth pulling the other ones apart
> to see if there's a better one?
>
> I don't know if a picture will show any more detail than the one
above--you
> almost can't tell visually that it's a groove--in fact on most of them
it's
> more of a "ripple" than a groove.
>
> Let me know what you think!
>
> mike