After managing to remove the brake rotor from the track driveshaft I thought my journey with this part of the snowmobile repair was over. I could now remove the driveshaft from the brake caliper which would let me remove the caliper. I could then push out the seized brake piston and be on my way. How naive.

What I should've realized was that if the brake rotor was so seized on the shaft that it broke my puller, then everything else would be equally seized on the shaft.

I won't go into all of the details, but I ended up cutting the brake caliper off of the shaft. I highly doubt this was the best path to take, but in my frustration it is where I ended up. What I was left with was one destroyed brake caliper (easy enough to replace) and a track driveshaft with 2 inner bearing races and 1 spacer completely seized on the shaft. At this point, I didn't want to also have to buy a new (used) track driveshaft so I slowed down a bit.

I could see no good way of removing the races from the shaft. They were completely seized on. Two nights of a PB B'laster soak made no dent. And there wasn't enough purchase anywhere to get a puller on. Off to do some research.

I came across this wonderful post which instructed me to cut a groove in the race. Cut it as deep as I could without going into the shaft. Then use a cold chisel and heavy hammer to split the bearing.

The post said "a real good whack". Mine took considerably more than one whack. But, eventually, the bearing split and I could then walk it off!

Closing thoughts

Many thanks to forums and the people who post in them. For years I've felt a growing sense of shame that I have consumed so much helpful information from folks on the internet and paid back almost nothing. Besides one YouTube video and a couple Stack Overflow answers when I was bored at my first job, I don't think I've ever posted on someone else's site. I'm not sure how or when that will change.

I hope Meta's new Forum app is a flop and people continue to post freely on forums that are indexable, viewable without an account, and not run by such a turd of a company.