Rear wheel bearing - done!
 

Three days of sweat and blood, literally.

Finally done one side....

17 year old car, 135k miles, previous owner lived in the salty air on the south coast, this thing fought me every step of the way!

Anyone know how to photobucket some pics up?

Resize your images down to around 100K and add them as attachments in your posts. Go to additional options and manage attachements. You can add up to 10 images.

If you think the rears are bad wait till you get to the fronts LOL

I use Tapatalk for posting photos all automatic use medium size. Congrats on beating that bearing into submission. After destroying three bearing press rods on two front bearing jobs I rebuilt the tool to use 1" bolt and tripled the capability. Now I can press over 30T


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

So, Andrew... what address do I send my front knuckles to...? ;)

If I was in auz I would definitely do that but maybe better I can help you construct a copy of the tool. I started with a set from harbor freight you can also buy on Amazon but drilled out the largest five or six plates to a 1" hole to upgrade the push rod from the useless 3/4" that can handle 12Ton to bump it up to about 32T. You need to apply a shit ton of torque to achieve full power because lubricated torque spec on a 1" bolt is 750 ft·lb! (Works perfectly for me that's the max output of my impact wrench). The beauty of using the tool is the knuckles stay on the car and no allignment needed.

I've been meaning to measure just the few sizes of plates needed for X5 and see if there is some common part or tool that can be sourced easily.

Thanks Andrew... was (kinda) kidding about posting the knuckles but your generosity know no limits...! :thumbup:

I have a similar set of bearing presses - and used them to replace a rear bearing on my X5 last year - 6 hours from key out to key in and driving away - not a bad effort for a first-timer.

Haven't had to mess with a front bearing yet and if I ever do, I'll either have to upgrade the cups in the tool set or buy another set - none of the cups are large enough in diameter for the front bearing (they only go up to 92mm). I'll upgrade the push rod at the same time....

P.S. be careful about mixing up Aussies and Kiwis - you never know which will be the more offended! :rofl:

Funny about the aus/kiwi I actually think I got your handle mixed with somebody from the big island. Thanks for the heads up. Remind me of when we had an exchange student from Chile and everybody kept asking him what he thought of America and he always said the same thing "I am FROM America: South America".

Definitely roll your own for changing the front bearings. It's a cake walk to change with the right tool but the 3/4" rod with the tools you can buy isn't close to strong enough to push a front bearing. The math works out to about 17T of force and 3/4 rod is designed for 11T.

I just used my press to change the front thrust bushings on my wife's car. https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...c979141fc2.jpg

To give you an idea of the forces involved definitely not possible to hammer them in!

When pressing with the 35T press the sleeve went right in but I definitely wear earplugs because it takes a while with the 750 ft·lb impact banging away.

When changing the front bearings I've still been heating up the knuckle to about 120°C but no longer bother to freeZe the bearing for removing but have been freezing the bearing overnight before installing.

The math worked out to about 12-13T for installation. (There is a formula for thread size/pitch/torque that will give you linear clamping force on a bolt)

When using the upgraded press to push on the read bearing it was laugh out loud funny to watch how fast it went compared to the front bearing!

I put the stack of bearing hub and plates in a vise and ran the big impact tool for all of 10-15 seconds laughing most of that time.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro