Front strut axle repairs Options

[technicalninja]

Has anyone ever repaired a front axle?

The bearings can spin and reduce the axle diameter. Porsche AND Nissan (and lots of others) with old school front wheel bearings all have this issue.

In the past I've simply replaced the strut. Both Z car and Porsche struts are getting rare and I was wondering if anyone had tried plating or maybe powder coat to restore the original diameter.

Thoughts, suggestions?

[Krieger]

This post is very timely. My spindles were just shipped yesterday from a plater. My 911 3" struts had an issue with wear on the spindle surface where the outer wheel bearing sits. Specifically the bottom. If you look there will be a step that you can feel or see. The symptoms I was having: no matter how tight you made the outer nut for adjustment the wheel bearings still felt loose. Oh, and at the race track when applying the brakes at any speed over 100 mph the steering wheel shakes like a mofo... The left sides seem to have the most wear. I am on my second set of used 3" struts. New 3" don't seem to be available. I want to keep the smaller lighter 3" with my aluminum Brembos. I decided to break the struts down by removing the spindles. That was harder than I thought. I sent the spindles out to be hard chrome plated. The basic process is to grind the spindles undersize, hard chrome plate them oversize, then grind down back to spec. I did this one before on my 3.0 crank where the cam drive gear sits (another long story). This has worked perfectly for the crank so I figured I'd give it a try for the spindles. $275 for each spindle, plus tax and shipping. Electronic Chrome and Grinding, Santa Fe Springs CA. It took a year to get the work done with me calling every week the last two months...

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/headbang.gif)

Fortunately these are an extra struts that I bought so the car is still drivable.