I’m going to share a sotry about some front-end work my dad and I did on a Dodge Intrepid once, just for perspective. I needed new front wheel bearings on the car. This is a job I had completed before, and with my dad’s assistance (just retired with 40 years as a mechanic at Chrysler), I was pretty sure we could pull it off (so to speak).
Well, we got the point where it was necessary to separate the axle from the hub (I beleive you couldn’t just replace the bearings, you had to replace the whole hub). The nut holding the axle on was a cast iron bitch to get off. 350 ft-lbs of torque would not budge it. It is a constant-tension nut, so we knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We applied a penetrating lubricant and even got it red-hot with a torch, but it would not move. We ended up cutting it off with a dremel tool (which required about 30 minutes of cutting through the wheel hub first, switching off dremel tools so they don’t overheat). Then came the time to seperate the axle from the hub.
We whacked it with a sledge. Then we really hit it hard with the sledge. Then we got out a brass punch and I held it with a LONG set of plies while my dad hit the thing Tiger Woods style. We quit when I realized the end of the brass punch started to look like a mushroom.
Finally we had to do more disassembly, remove the entire axle from the car with it conected to the hub, and my dad took it to work to put on a hydraulic press.
The hydraulic press was not good enough, he needed to go to a hammering hydraulic press, and I beleive it was about 5 tons before the axle popped out.
Wow, that day sucked.
Anyhow, the bottom line is: It can easily waste much more of your time than you expect. If this is your only transportation, the 250 is probably worth it, if you can afford it. Most front-end alignments are around 80 bucks anyhow, so you’re only paying someone a couple hours of labor plus a pittance for parts. I’d let the shop do it.