I don't blame the wife and like any other part on the car some times they break. When we were kids the wife hauled me home with a chain, a white knuckle ride through the Cascades. She wanted us to get home before dark. I was in a '64 Impala sans motor and trans. When we were safe in the driveway she walks around the car and says, "This wheel looks funny" and kicked it. It dropped, the spindle was broken behind the inside bearing. Anyway sometimes they break.
Just went through a similar thing Search "spindle nut stripped" Pass side bearing was gone Put a want add here on the hamb and had 2 new spindles in less than a week Ordered new king pins and bearings and had Napa machine the spindle bushings Used good disc brake grease with proper pre load good to go Sent from my XT1254 using H.A.M.B. mobile app
I dunno. There should be plenty of old America NOS and NORS still around I'd think. I replaced a set that had been run a while, Romanian iirc. I saved them, they started to take on a brass color almost, probably high mileage or worn. Installed SKF from Japan. They are a high quality component, no problem as far as that goes. At one time Jaypan parts were limited to plastic gag flower squirt guns and B/W television sets. They got better.
I bet there's a whole lot of wheel bearing checking/packing going on right about now. I just did each of my project cars and my trailers and I must admit to wondering where the bearings were really made. Glad that happened where and how it did, that could have really bad. Good luck and I hope the wife reconsiders, any car can have parts failures.
The replacement bearings they sent.he took them out of the Chinese boxes. Motion industries sold me timken and they are USA made!
One of the first things the instructor taught us in Auto shop when I was a 15 year old sophomore was how to correctly pack a wheel bearing and then adjust it. Over the years I have not had wheel bearing problems with wheels I packed either on personal rigs or on customer rigs which run in the thousands but I have seen a lot of bearings that failed that were not packed right to begin with. One thing I never do is wash a bearing in any sort of solvent as that is almost a sure cause of future bearing failure because there is no way to get the solvent out of the bearing.
I've never used a tapered bearing without washing it in solvent, even a new one. The stuff they put on them to prevent rust isn't the best lubricant. When you remove bearings, no matter how careful you are, dirt can get in them. I wash them in solvent and blow them dry with compressed air before packing them by scraping the roller spacer into the grease in the palm of my hand until grease comes out the other side. The thing about a greased bearing is that the rollers push the grease off to the side like a tire rolling through snow moves snow off to the side. It takes a grease that's very sticky. I like the grease that I can pinch between my fingers and it stretches an inch or more before it separates. Filling the hub between the bearings provides some extra grease that the spinning of the wheel can force some to the bearing ends. Heavy trucks use a gear lube instead so it is constantly keeping the bearings lubed. The car shredder I worked on had a 16 inch shaft with a double roller bearing that was lubed with a fairly thin synthetic gear lube pumped through it and back through a cooler.
Many years ago I had a front wheel outer bearing fail, welded itself onto the stub axle, this was a disc brake setup on my 1940 Dodge that used the original stub axle..........I didn't realise that there IS a difference between normal wheel bearing grease and that made for disc brakes or HTB...High Temperature Bearing grease..........I didn't have the stub axle break but this problem reminded me of what I had happen & thought I'd mention it......hope you have some joy in sorting this out......regards, andyd
Ok, so I'm about 16-17 years old and doing front bearings on someone's car at Kelley's Enco station. My boss sees me rinsing the bearings in solvent and blowing them off with the air hose. "Be careful, don't spin those bearings too much" Me; "OK" as he leaves for the day. Five minutes later I have the inner bearing doing 6000 rpm on my middle finger and BOOM. It disintegrated, shrapnel flew everywhere and took out the fluorescent lights in the bay! Luckily I still hand my hand, fingers and both eyes. I ordered a new bearing and sheepishly finished the job. My finger was about the size of a big ol' Polish sausage the next day. I still wash 'em and blow 'em dry but without spinning them! I usually hand pack 'em and use a grease that stretches like the man said.
I thought someone might have a story about spinning them too fast. I told a guy I worked with not to do that and of course he did it anyway with a similar result. It's difficult to find good grease these days. Many greases say they are rated for wheel bearings but aren't what I like to use. I liked the old Wolf's Head grease. It was a NLGI #4 grease. I liked to use gloves when packing bearings because the grease was very difficult to get off my hands. Now Wolf's Head lists it's red grease as a wheel bearing grease and it comes in NLGI #1 or #2. It would likely work if the application allowed grease to be applied through a fitting every so often but wheel bearings are usually serviced when brakes are replaced.
NO CLUE what customer service is ( unfortunately TOO common) If you explained calmly to him what the problem was, he should have explained to you ( also calmly) what might have gone wrong and offered to help you out as best he could. (Although after almost wrecking your car with the Little Lady on board, you would understandably be a bit pissed off.) Hope everything works out OK , glad the car and passengers escaped injury.
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