Greasing slide yoke frequency

Spiders are easy... Pump till the grease comes out. My question is how often should you grease the slide yoke or know when it's under or over serviced? All I've been able to find is 3-5 pumps per application, not how often. Thanks in advance and apologies if I didn't dig deep enough into the forum.

 

I too have questions on this. But I don’t even know where to start, what’s a yoke, what’s a slider? What’s what?

 

There's are several parts of the maintenance manual that make recommendations. I do mine every 5k, when I change the oil. The manual includes them on the checklist for every day of off-roading, but I don't recall anyone saying that they lube that often.

 

I was doing it twice a year during oil changes, but I could tell that the grease I was pushing out still looked good. So now I just do it once a year since it’s a messy job, at least for me.

Really depends on your usage. I’d be willing to bet that there are owners that never do it and don’t have problems.

 

Maybe do a small pump every 20k miles. Maybe

I put too much in mine then it didn't articulate because it couldn't slide at all. This meant the transmission was taking the load of the force from the rear tires instead of the suspension. Very not good.

So I unbolted the axle and removed the zerk fitting, pushed rhe axle forward to push the grease out. And now thr suspension works like it should.

So be careful. Doesn't need much or any grease.

 

I unfortunately did not find any information about this yet on Toyotas Service Informataion System online. And I simply do not trust doing it based solely off of YouTube videos. Not all guns’ pumps sizes are the same. 3-5 pumps seems quite the “guess”

 

You might have better luck using their terminology. I can't remember if you were part of discussion on this topic, but they refer to them as "propeller shafts", so that might work better in searching. (They use "drive shaft" to refer to the CV axles).

 

I do about 5 pumps evey oil change.

 

I just do it every 15k miles. Some people don’t do it at all and have ran it up to 100k miles.

 

5-6 pumps at 5K oil changes, so far so good.

 

n/a

 

For recurring uncertainty, this topic rivals the choice of straight 75W vs 75W90 for the transfer case

 

This is a fuzzy one, I'm currently planning for a pump or two (yes, the SAE standard grease gun pump quantity!) every 10-15k.

 

After all, you can take the average from the whole thread at the end and then have a good reference point
Because my propellershafts looked dry i greased it twice last year. In future once a year (15k km) rear 4 pumps front 2 pumps with the greasegun.
On the spiders pump until the dirty grease is out and wipe off the rest.

 

I will start with one pump. Regarding Toyota Service Information System, there's component list, installation and removal of propeller shaft, rebuilding it, etc. But there's nothing on lubricating it.

 

2 pumps max. 3 is excessive

 

It's in the thin booklet titled "Warranty & Maintenance Guide" that comes with the Owner's Manual. That has the checklists and logs for maintenance by miles or years, plus some other stuff. In the 2023 manual, the first reference to propeller shaft lubrication is on Page 37 (Off-Road Daily Maintenance), and it's mentioned on pretty much every page thereafter.

 

A few pumps once a year should be fine. You’ll know when it needs more grease if after a hard stop you feel a bump and thump from the driveline.

 

Reposting here from another thread.

So I did the job, and here are all my findings.

The car and finding the zerks:
1. I did not have to lift the car.
2. I can rotate the FWD drive shaft freely with my hand if the car is in 2L and park. This is not the case if the transmission and transfer case are in neutral.
3. I can’t rotate the rear drive shaft at all unless I lift the car. Instead, I just rolled the car forward 6-10 inches and all zerks positions worked out for me.
4. I did the full job while the car was on park and not lifted.
5. Two spider joints in the rear shaft (two zerks, one for each), and one yoke (one zerk). Total of three zerk in the rear.
6. Two spider joints in the front shaft (two zerks, one for each), and one yoke (one zerk). Total of three zerk in the front.
7. I recommend locating them all, and verifying access prior to starting. Its not as bad as it sounds.

The Lube:
- I used valvoline superior performance lithium NGLI 2 for all four spider joints. Two in the RWD shaft and two in the FWD shaft.
- Valvoline superior performance lithium with moly NGLI 2 for the two yolks. One in the FWD shaft and one in the RWD shaft.

The Lubing:
- I used a coupler attached to my gun. I highly recommend doing that. If you don’t you might get the hose stuck on your zerk. I almost did. Use a coupler. Lock N Lube from Amazon is a good one. Makes attaching to the zerk and removing a breeze.
- For the spider joints I pumped until the grease started coming out. Then cleaned a bit.
- For the yolks, I pumped 5 pumps. I then removed the zerks with a long 7mmsocket and bounced the car around to relieve pressure. I had no extra grease on the rear. But the front one had a bit that came out after bouncing the car around for a bit.

Conclusion:
- While the FWD spider coupling was hard to attach to, it wasn’t all that terrible. I didn’t have to remove any skids. It’s easier to reach from the passenger side.
- Also the FWD yolk and spider joint clearly had more grease than the rear. Because they get used less often.
- All in all it wasn’t a hard job, it was just tedious because it was the first time doing it. And there was a lot to learn. The job gets dirty and messy quickly if you’re not careful, grease manages to geteverywhere if you touch it.