wheel bearings...

OMG easier than pie to change but made out of playdough.

To pull the bearings off you remove 4 bolts holding the pocket to the spindle, remove the axle nut and pound the damn thing off with a big hammer or a three jaw puller and break two or three of them trying to get the bearing pocket loose.

Then you throw away the hub and old bearing. Yes throw it away. The hub has a tolerance of .002" and pounding the hell out of it with a hammer or bending the hell out of it with a 3 jaw puller will give you the worst vibration in the world under braking. Feels like death wobble from a jeep only scarier.

I wound up ordering two new hubs from and two bearings already assembled in the pockets with the seals. The hubs are around $85 and the bearings are about $120 per side and the seals are about 10$ per side.

Not a bad job but it would be best if you knew what you were getting into before you tackle this job.

oh and this just in... if you have a bent hub and drive it even a little and hit the brakes you will suddenly need new rotors and that means new pads, which when you go to change them will lead you to find that the inner rear pot on both front calipers is frozen which means that I will be replacing everything from the spindle out in the course of a week.

On a lighter note it meant I drove Toby to work today down I40 from Lewisville to Peters Creek Parkway today. Its kinda scary keeping up with traffic on 40 with no doors and being able to see the tires rolling.

Thanks for the info, I believe the wheel bearing and hubs are sealed/assembled togther so it would be impossible to seperate the 2 and reuse either.

Any pic's

the hub is a seperate piece from the bearing. They have to be pressed together and apart. On the pressing apart even a brand new bearing will be destroyed due to the tolerances of the bearing on the hub.



This is the wheel bearing assembly

the hub is is pressed into the bearing pocket and has the wheel mounting flange on it as well. It is splined to accept the CV shaft.

My hubs were bent and when I replaced the old wheel bearings with new ones with no slop the bend caused a terrible vibration over 45mph and hitting the brakes would cause violent wobble due to the no floating caliper design and the rotor being mounted to the hub. When I hit the brakes with the bent hub it managed to severely warp the rotors. when I replaced the rotors and pads I found out one of the 4 pots in the caliper on both sides was frozen. So after tomorrow I will have all new parts from the spindle out on the front of my 4runner.

I didnt take any pictures because this should be a fairly straight forward job but I had some severely abused parts that made things a lot worse. With a press available, an impact gun, a 35mm socket, a 17mm socket, and a hammer I could change one of these bearings in about 15 minutes now though. I have had mine apart and back together 4 times now getting all the broken parts fixed.