So I followed the the post Here about rebuilding the front driveshaft of my Disco 2.

When it came time to remove the "centering bearing" I didn't have a slide hammer. I tried to fake it with one leg of a wheel puller and some random bits of metal and a hammer, but it didn't seem very promising.

Sorry if this has been posted elsewhere, or if it's kinda ridiculous, but here's what I did. It's a great solution if you have access to a lathe.

Once you remove the plastic seal and pull the guts out of the bearing like the guy in the linked post, you're left with two pieces that still need to come out. 1) a metal sphere with a cylindrical hole bored through it, and 2) a "waistband" of metal that holds the sphere captive and is press fit into the drive shaft flange. These two pieces don't come apart; the goal is to remove them as a pair.

What I did was make a little cylinder of aluminum that pressed semi-snug into the bore of the sphere. The center of the cylinder is drilled through and tapped.

One end of the bore has a little lip, so if you press the cylinder in from the other end it will butt up against the lip and stop. The cylinder is short enough to fit all the way into the sphere, so once it is in, you can rotate the sphere. Now you rotate it so that the end with the lip is pointing up - the cylinder is now totally captured inside the sphere.

Finally, you just thread a bolt into the cylinder. This gives you an easy way to grab and pull upwards on the sphere with lots of force. I just used a hunk of metal and a hammer and it came out pretty easily. But if needed you could pull up pretty darn hard.

Hard to describe in words, so here's a some pics.

Here's the cylinder with the bolt threaded into it.




And here is a top view of the cylinder and the bearing. You can see the lip at the bottom end of the bore through the bearing.


And this shows how it all looked right when the bearing came out. The left side is where the cylinder went in; the right side is where the lip is.



Hope this helps, or at least helps kill some time...

 

Another helpful trick.

Take the old centering bearing and put in on top of a vise opened just a bit wider than the sphere. Hit the sphere with a hammer so that it is knocked out of the ring ("waistband").

The ring is the perfect size for pressing the new centering bearing into the yoke.