Read motorvate's guide. Two things:

1) Turpentine. Where do you buy it, and is it the best for cleaning a filthy joint?
2) He says almost nothing in his guide about ripping the inner end of the axle from the transmission. Does anybody have details? I saw a touch more info on raxles.com that a guy did for his Mitsubishi, but I want to do it as easily as possible without extra work for myself

Thanks! I plan on doing my 97's both outers tomorrow. This will be the biggest job I've done on either car, as most other stuff I've done has been maintenance.

 

If your boots are broken and the CV joint is filthy dirty your better off buying a new axle because your contaminated joint WILL eventually fail.

 

Yeah I've considered that, but given the massive cost savings of doing it myself (not to mention it's another notch on my belt) I'm going to give it a go like this first. One of the boot is of yet untorn, and the other tear is recent, with zero apparent damage (which I can more thoroughly check when the axle's off the car).

 

You're better off listening to Tom. Do you know for a fact when exactly it was torn? Probably not. You're most likely going to pay the 30 bucks for the rebuild kit, replace the boot, and have the axle fail on you in a year or two and end up spending the money anyway.

 

Replacing CV boots is a pain in the ***. New axles with both joints are like 60$.

 

just replace the whole axle. when my axle finally died, (i drove on a ripped cv boot for about 5 months) i bought a used one off an org member for $40, and he helped me install it too. that was about a year ago and its still fine.