Front Wheel Bearing R&R

[davintosh]

This doesn't pertain to the front wheel bearing, but thought I'd stick it here anyway. My son & I tore into the right-rear corner of the X5 this weekend to replace the wheel bearing and several other parts. It took us a couple of hours on Friday night and most of the day yesterday to remove & replace the bearing, ball joint, integral link, forward susp. link, wishbone, and parking brake shoes. Heck of a job. The only glitch came in with the wheel bearing; we finally got the inner race off of the wheel hub around noon yesterday (woohoo!) then took a break. My son went back out to the garage a few minutes ahead of me, and when I got there he had the new bearing pressed onto the hub already, but had it on backwards. Doh.

We hoped that since it had just gone on we might get lucky and get it off without tearing it up, but no dice. We'll chalk that one up as a lesson in following diagrams and thinking harder about taking steps that can't be reversed. $60. Good thing that was the first side we did, so we had another bearing in the box ready to go; it just means I'll have to order a replacement and we won't be able to finish the job this weekend like we had hoped. He'll just have to come back next weekend to help with the other side, which doesn't bother his mom a bit. After doing the one side, I'm confident the other side will go a lot faster.

Putting things back together went pretty smoothly. I can tell already that the rear wheel has lost it's negative camber and the fat-lady-in-heels look on that side. Haven't driven it enough to figure out if that was the bearing that was causing all the road howl or not.

I was kinda following in the steps of this guy's writeup for replacing a rear bearing the"Easy-Way!", but I sure didn't see a way to get at the bolts holding the wheel bearing without taking the wheel carrier off. But with all the other parts we were replacing, getting the wheel carrier free (almost) was not a big deal at all; the only thing we couldn't get loose was the parking brake cable, but that was easy to work around, so NBD. The fact that the rear wheel bearing bolts to the wheel carrier is the big difference between the procedures for the front & rear bearings; no need for a slide hammer or anything else to yank the hub loose.

Oh, and I decided to fab up a new tool to pull the splined axle into the hub (like this one except with a piece of iron pipe instead of a socket); I made one earlier and lent it to Ricky Bobby, but my welding job didn't hold up to the torque required to slide the axle through. My son has actually been trained on how to use a welder like the little MIG unit I have (I've only done stick welding, and that was many, many moons ago), so I had him do the welding. Well, this one didn't hold up either. It got the axle slid out a ways before giving up the ghost, but we ended up just using a slim dowel against the inside of the axle near the boot to tap it out far enough for the new nut to grab some threads. Before fitting the hub with the new bearing back on the carrier, we also spent some quality time with some penetrant and a wire brush cleaning up the splines on the axle and the hub, then applied some anti-sieze compound; I think that made a difference in getting the thing to slide into position easily. The axle sure didn't slide out of the hub easily.