My forward and rearward universal joints have grease fittings on them and I thought that it would be a good idea to squirt some grease into them. This was my first time at ever trying to do this. The picture shows the rear U-joint and the bright dot in the center is the grease fitting.
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I bough this mini-grease gun at Sears for $6.23 and it came with a 3-oz tube of lithium grease. I included my car keys in the photo to provide scale.
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I wiped the grease fittings clean, pushed the grease gun onto the fittings and gave them three squirts each. Here are my questions:
My grease gun did not "snap" onto the grease fitting, and I just pushed the grease gun against firmly the against fitting when I pumped the grease
Is that the way it is supposed to be done?
How am I supposed to know if any grease went into the fitting? I wiped some fresh grease from around the fittings afterwards, so some was being pumped out of the grease gun.
Note in the grease gun photo how the plunger is all the way it. The grease gun had initially squirted some grease when I loaded its cartridge and it seemed to pump grease when I did the rear U-joint. Then when I tried to grease the front U-joint it seemed like no grease was coming out. I put my thumb on the release and pushed the plunger and was surprised to see that it easily moved all the way forward. How could that happen? The grease didn't squirt out from behind the plunger. The grease cartridge had felt like it had some weight to it and that it had grease in it and it was was not empty. Does it take the first cartridge of grease just to "prime" a new grease gun? After the plunger went all the way forward the gun started pumping grease again and that was when I applied three pumps to the forward U-joint.
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