> To all who get 200,000 miles out of their CV's, congratulations.  I
> suspect mostly flat terrain and mostly freeway driving in your life.  I
> still say they will last for "life" without repacking, whether that is
> 100,000 or 200,000 miles.  It is more dependent on how many hard turns
> you make (i.e., low speed, uphill, high torque, etc.) than it is on
> lubrication, as long as the boot is intact.
>
> Think about it before you respond!

i have thought about it, as has most manufacturers in the past: the GREASE
takes the load, not the metal. otherwise, the joints would wear out a
helluva lot faster than 30,000 miles. and as the grease takes the load, it
takes the heat and eventually, like all other fluids on an
automobile/boat/airplane/machine, it NEEDS to be replaced with new fresh
fluid. same thing with engine oil, same thing with brake fluid, same thing
with transmission oil or automatic transmission fluid.

if it were not so, then why have bolts on the cv joints? why not just put
them in there for life, like the ball joints (and in the old days, ball
joints DID have a mechanism, called a zert-fitting, that allowed you to
grease them as required by regular maintenance. and you didn't see that many
ball joint failures back then, if you kept the maintence correctly) of the
modern disposable cars. after all, nobody keeps cars for 100,000 miles
anymore anyway. all the cornering and hills and so forth do is to shorten
the lifespan of the grease. just as you should change the engine oil more
often if you drive mostly short stop-and-go city driving, you should also
clean and regrease the cv joints more often in that sort of driving.

the whole thing boils down to: it's your car, your money, your choice. you
do what you want with your cv joints. i'll continue to crawl up under my bus
and clean and repack the cv joints ... if nothing else, it gives me an
opportunity to find out what little things might be needed (like a loose cv
joint bolt or a small crack in the rubber cv joint boot) before they become
large problems that cost a lot of money or break and strand me and my bus
out in the middle of west texas. can you plan on your joints failing close
to home at 80-100,000 miles? or are you just gonna replace them wholesale at
80,000 miles, just to be sure.

joel
been driving vw's since 1958
been driving buses since 1970.
replaced ONE cv joint (torn boot) on a 71 bus.
your mileage and experience may differ.