Replace axle, or new rear?
 

New Axle, or New Rear?

Hey all,

So I spun-out one rainy morning taking a turn a little too fast and ended up hopping the curb up onto the median. I bent the axle a little bit and have been driving with a slight wobble to the passenger-side rear wheel. The wobble really isn't as noticeable as you might think—but I can spot it when the rear is up on jacks and I put it into gear. What bothers me even more though is that my car sounds like a tricycle now: the wobble is causing the rear caliper to oscillate constantly with the misaligned rotor and now I have a loud “squeak, squeak, squeak” with each rotation.

I know I need to replace the axle, but this is a Borg-Warner rear (it's an '89 IROC). I've gotten one price quote for a new replacement single axle which was around $200.00 . Does that sound reasonable? I could swear I've seen entire used rearends for not a whole lot more than that. I just wanted to get some opinions here on this; as I see it, my options are:

A) Foot the $200.00 bill to get a new axle which corrects maybe 1 or 2 degrees of bend.
B) Find a deal on another used rear and just use that. This begs the question of what rear to get.
C) Just try to correct the squeaking sound from the caliper (lube the bolts maybe?) and be done with it. I'm just assuming that there's no safety issues with driving around with a slightly bent axle.

I'm a student and don't have a lot of money. What would you guys do in this situation?

Thanks.

Well, there is no garuntee with parts that have been damaged.

That being said, my axle has been bent the past 60,000 miles. Makes the noise and everything. It's still here today, and made that noise about 4 hours ago.

Your axle MIGHT be okay for a while. As far as fixing it, it's a balance of how much you want to spend vs. how long you wanna wait vs. how long you wanna trust your damaged axle. You should be able to get an entire 10 bolt stock replacement for $200 though.

Yeah, I have been shopping around on the boards and eBay a bit and did confirm my suspicion that entire rearends could be had for a similar amount. Ideally, I'd like to go to a junkyard and just pull an axle from there, but I suspect that I won't have much luck with that considering how comparatively rare the 9-bolts are (combined with how crappy the third-gen market is here in north Texas).

I'm of the impression that a 10-bolt will be a downgrade from a 9-bolt, so I'm not looking at doing that. I'm probably just going to try to fix the squeak and put-off fixing this until I can run across a good deal on another 9-bolt axle or rear.