I packed the bearing, around the shaft through the hub, between the hub and big seal, and smeared some behind the locking hub. Im a fan of the "more is better" adage.

 

Hey Jeff, u need some help? I' d like to see how its done just in case I need to do mine.

 

I never turn down good help. He's playing golf tomorrow, so we're planning on Sunday. I'll talk to him about what time and shoot you a text.

 

I hear ya jeff, Mine was bone dry. I wondered if the hub assembly came lubed?

Or, are you sposta grease the needle bearing when you install it. I did not do mine myself.

 

Jeff, thanks for the post. I have seen this but forgot. I fact I saved it also. My computer been down and on the wifes. I thought I read one time or another that the early birds were different but am not sure.

Chet

 

He bought just the needle bearings and seals etc., not the hub assembly. They will be dry, but I don't have a clue about the ones that come with the hub assembly...

 

Sounds great.

 

Well, finally getting a change to post results. Rob came out and lended a hand yesterday, which was greatly appreciated and enjoyed. I did the driver side first, even though we suspected the passenger being the issue. Here's a video of the driver side movement in the axle shaft.


In comparison, I took a video of me doing the same thing on my truck and there was ZERO flex or movement.


I may get spunky enough later today to take an after video on the dually for direct comparison. (I couldn't get a before clip of the passenger side,which was much worse, because apparently when an iPhone sits in the sun for three hours it goes into shutdown mode until it cools off...)

I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, guzzle did a fantastic write up, no point in doing another, but I will post the results

Surprisingly, everything came off relatively easy. The toughest part was hammering the old seals off if the axle shafts. The driver side needle bearing wasn't as bad as I had expected, but after driving it out we could feel a LOT of grit. How did sand/dirt get in there? Well there was no yellow oring, so every time the hubs tried to lock automatically the vacuum pump would suck unfiltered air in. . We took our time with a wire wheel on the drill and cleaned everything up really well, including the inside of the knuckle, polished the groove for the yellow oring, and got rid of any grime before reinstalling. We also checked the slide pins before reinstalling and they were fine.

We hit a snag when we got ready to drive the new seals on. I couldn't find the old seal driver that I had made (think it got left in My other truck after the wreck), and none of the parts stores had one. So into Home Depot for an 8" piece of 1-1/4" galvanized pipe and a 1-1/4" pipe flange. The flange had to be ground down a bit to fit inside the seal like its supposed to, so about 10 minutes on the grinder and we were ready to go.



(There was a thread here where somebody made one this way, but they had a lathe. They actually squared the handle to the base so that the seal would drive perfectly even. We simply rotated 15-20* after every tap to compensate. Works like a charm)

To clarify real quick, it's not necessary to replace these seals when doing needle bearings. We replaced them because the auto hubs were not functioning properly, and that was the last step to rebuild the vacuum system (knuckle seal, yellow oring, and black oring).

So driver side done, nothing notable for pics really. Passenger side though, there were some issues there. First off, we forgot to take the snap ring off the axle shaft. Turns out the hub doesn't like coming off with the snap ring in place. We realized and it slid right off. What a mess we saw.









Don't know if any explanation is necessary. Tons of grit, grime, and grust (most likely due to a bad knuckle seal (the yellow oring was there on this side) caused the bearings to freeze up, resulting in them grinding down. The vibration is due to a hoola hoop motion that is created by the resulting gap. Locking the hubs like pop said above will force the shaft to spin with the hub, keeping the bearings from grinding down any further and/or damaging the axle shaft.

We did inspect the axle shaft, and found a slight amount of wear. We polished it a bit with a hand file and wire wheel and figured that dog would hunt.

Then we ran into stuck slide pins. Another hour set back driving the old pins out and cleaning the bracket holes real good. New pins installed and everything back together. Oh we also greased the main bearings through the abs holes as well. No more vibration and the auto hubs work once again (although I suspect te vacuum pump is getting very tired).

Thanks again Rob for all the help. Really enjoyed it.

 

No problem Jeff. I enjoyed it myself. I actually learned how to take the hub off and axle out and remove the seals. Its good because I went to test my 4wd out with the a/c on and it went straight to defrost so I might have to pull the hubs and ck for a vacuum lk. I'll ck everything else first before I do that.

But anyway, glad we got it all back together and even had some time to do some data logging.

 

Just about six months after the right side bearing failed the left side started exhibiting the same symptoms on the hwy 100 miles from home. Locked the hubs and picked up a bearing at NAPA. Replaced the left needle bearing this morning, here is the old one, dry as a bone:

 

What's the stub axle shaft look like?

Pop

 

It appeared to be in OK shape. No major wear on the bearing surface.