<VV> Rear wheel bearings

[Tony Underwood]

At 04:04 hours 02/16/2005, Ewell Mills wrote:
>I also took apart a couple of rear wheel bearings that had had the grease
>fittings installed, and found just what you did. ( A lot of fresh grease in
>the cavity with basically none having reached the bearings due to the old
>grease having hardened).  IMHO the only way to do this is to disassemble them,
>clean out all the old grease etc. and repack them.  After having done a few
>with tools borrowed from a friend, I now feel that the price that our
>(Corvair) vendors get for nice clean rebuilt ones is a real good deal.  Just
>my .02 cents worth.




For whatever it's worth:


I addressed the old grease by having the car on jackstands running in 4th 
gear, spinning the rear hubs to "mix things up" a bit, and blowing a 
boatload of brake-klene into the hub assy through the zerk fitting hole 
until it ran out through the grease seals.   Then I blew it out with air, 
and repeated the whole process several times.    It finally reached the 
point where the brake-klene came out clear.    Then I shut the car 
down,  gave the bearing hubs another shot just to be safe and blew them out 
with compressed air until I was sure everything was dry.   I then pumped 
grease into the hub through the reinstalled zerk fitting, ran the car in 
4th gear again while pumping grease yet again until I was able to make an 
educated guess that enough of it had reached the races and roller 
cages.   I  continued to let the car run in 4th for a while and kept an eye 
on the grease seals for weeping grease...   which *did* ooze out since I'd 
been kinda heavy on the grease gun.    I cleaned it up, ran the engine 
again, cleaned more grease (I cleaned the front where the brake shoes were; 
didn't care about grease out the back seal) and repeated until no more 
grease weeped.   A week later I popped the back drums and replaced the 
brake shoes (which needed replacing anyway) and did find more grease on 
them.   I cleaned everything, checked again a couple weeks later, 
everything was still OK.

That  was around a decade anna half ago, bearings are still doing fine and 
no grease weeps to this day.


Now:   This worked for me.   What I do isn't necessarily what someone else 
should do because I am a jackleg.

Sure, if the hub are of the car and on the bench, grab the tools and 
dismantle, clean and lube, no problem.     If you pull into the driveway 
and you notice that one off the rear hubs has begun to produce a squeak now 
and then, and it's Saturday evening...  Sunday gets spent doing a little 
experimenting to see what would happen.

*Your* mileage could well vary.


tony..