I've always treated FWD axles as a unit, just replacing the whole thing, so I've got a pretty stupid question about how these things are constructed.
In the process of doing a transmission swap on my 1st gen Neon, I've wound up with two driver's side axle assemblies. The one that I trust from the existing car came apart while I was disassembling the front end so that the boot came off the tripod, the tripod remained in the transmission and the CV joint was exposed. No rips, no tears, never had any failure or wear symptoms from the axles, and the whole thing was a sealed unit until it came apart in the garage. The other one came off the donor car and has God-knows-how-many miles on it and is of totally unknown quality. The boots are all intact, but after I put it on the car, I found that the inside joint seems to be disconnected from the tripod in some way.
My question is: Once those come apart, are they just toast? Or can I take the original axle from the car, put the joint back in the tripod, add grease and a boot, and be good to go? If this was just the rallycross car, I'd get a new axle for it and be done, but since I'm trying to also play by Challenge budget rules, I'm trying to be cheap.
