Anyone ever tackled this? Wife's car has been making a few funky noises as of late and my first assumption was the center carrier bearing, based on where the sound was coming out from under the car. Finally crawled underneath tonight and kinda confirmed my suspicions. In the past couple weeks I've been researching replacement driveshafts, replacing "non serviceable" u joints (thanks to a pretty thorough write-up on here from the past), and have only really found the driveshaft sold as a complete assembly. Tonight I found a few options for the carrier bearing by itself, but unfortunately they're basically all on Amazon or eBay and none of them have any recognizable brand names of course. Carrier bearings separately range from about $35-50 let's say. The complete driveshafts range from $250-600+, depending on brand and/or where you get it from. Do I take my chances with a no name carrier bearing for ~$50 (and some labor and swearing trying to separate and replace it), or do I take my chances with a $250 driveshaft that's a much faster repair job that most likely has the same generic carrier bearing already installed in it? Haha.
Lol isn't that the question we ask ourselves with every project we start on these things? I vote 50$ bearing and see how it goes, though my 2013 WRX u-joints started failing in the driveshaft, so it might be that you replace the carrier then find out it's actually the shaft or some combination of the pair.
I too vote for $50 bearing. You will be swearing some no matter which route you go. However, the overriding factor in my vote is based on the fact that I am not involved in any way other than seeing the outcome in this thread.
Which engine/transmission does it have? I might have a whole good driveshaft for you, for a "get it out of my attic" price.
So... Upon further inspection the rear most u joint was toast as well, so that basically dictated that the fix was to replace the whole shebang. After taking an extra day for troubleshooting (looked at it last night again after work), that bumped the potential ship dates out to Tuesday (even with Amazon prime). So we made the last minute decision to just say F it and went to O'Reilly this morning and bought the one they had in stock. Retail is frickin $672 and with my commercial account it brought it down to $599. Yeehaw... However, it's at least a brand name that I've heard of before and it now also has serviceable u joints. And a lifetime warranty...
Gotcha. Sometimes it just can't wait. I had a 2005 with the EZ30 and 5EAT and got a deal on a nice low-mile replacement driveshaft assembly from a junkyard, only to find it was the wrong length, so it's definitely for a 2.5. Odds are it's 4EAT though. It can stay in the attic.
