While doing brake pads on the front of my 01 F250 4wd (with 150000 miles on it) I noticed the hub and tire can move up and down. My immediate thought was a bad wheel bearing in the hub. The axle moves up and down about 1/2" at the seal at the knuckle/axle tube. From what I have seen from searches this is normal. I did some searching here and found guzzle's instructions for servicing the spindle/needle bearings and pulled the hub. The spindle looks good and so do the needle bearings. In fact, from what I can tell the unservicble bearing in the hub seems fine. Everything seems hunky dory.

My current thinking is if I have it torn down this far might as well do ball joints, but this is not my question. Oh, and I checked the ball joints and they seem tight with no play.

My question is this. If everything seems fine as far as the hub is concerned, is it normal to have this much play? I have never notriced this before when rotating tires, etc. and just find it odd to have this much movement without finding anything obviously "bad". I am inclined to put it back together once I have greased the spindle bearing and serviced the auto-locking hub.

Any comments, questions, insults , or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Dwight

AND, I don't know who Guzzle is, but he is priceless. His write ups have been invaluable so thanks Guzzle.

 

When I replaced my knuckle seal a lot of my play went away. Dont know if that could be your issue, but it certainly helped mine out somehow.

 

No, play is not normal and something is wearing out. That being said, those unit hubs can go for thousands of miles and be worn. Not that I am advocating running them till they fall off, but from a purely speculative standpoint, I would say that from the time they begin to fall out of spec in terms of "play", to the time the start growling so bad you think they are gonna rip clean off is in the tens of thousands. We have several 4x4s in our fleet with over 200k miles on them and I have seen those bearings take some massive abuse. Often the don't start acting up till the truck is halfway across the country and you can't do anything about it. I have seen then them drive up to 2500 miles on a bearing once it starts growling before we could get it swapped out.

The moral of all this? The bearing IS likely starting to go bad and you should get it fixed, but it is not something you need to park the truck tomorrow over.

 

Try injecting some lithium-base wheel bearing grease into the ABS sensor hole to attempt to lube the "non-serviceable" main hub (wheel) bearing. It may buy you some time if there's no damage to the bearings themselves.

It's just as important as greasing the needle bearings.

Pop

 

I just replaced my hub this weekend due to the excessive play. I had to also replace my u joint. So, with the stub shaft being separated from the rest of the axle I was able to insert it into the new hub and the old hub for comparison. The shaft had the same amount of play in both. Since I already had the new hub (great deal on CL) I put the new one in. I think the new knuckle seal really helped mine too. And may have been the only part needing replacement. Although, the truck did handle the bumps better on the test drive. It didn't want to wander at all. So, two things I learned this weekend: 1 - replacing the hub is really not that hard to do. 2 - if you have to pull the new hub again to put the brake dust shield on the right way, it slides right out once you get all the bolts off. DOH

 

Dust shield? Oh yeah that part!!
Same here, I wonder how many of us have forgotten the dust shield and had to pull the hub off again.
John

 

Several times...........

 

Thanks for the input and tips. Who or what is CL everyone refers to?

 

www.craigslist.org

 

Craigslist.org, DUH! That did not even register with me.

Thanks again everyone for the input.

 

haha, its alright. There are lots of abbreviations around here and sometimes the simple ones make me think for a lil bit!

 

It happened to a "friend" of mine before...

$@##*!! dust shield...