Are you supposed to put grease into the dust cap when replacing it? Mine were loaded with grease when I removed them so I put new grease in when I put them on. Is that wrong? Will it damage anything or should I clean them out again? Thanks!
You don't need to. It won't hurt anything though. Most prople load up way too much grease in their spindle bearings. Better too much than too little though, When you do a brake job on a new car for the first time, it is amazing how little grease there is in there.
If you do put any in there , dont put much, if you load it up or put more then the space of the nut , washer etc.. takes up, it will be a ***** getting it back on..or I have seen them over packed like that and when they get hot ..pop off due to pressure or ooze the grease past the seal out back Its not necessary if you greased up the spindle bearings, and all properly
I worked in one shop (shortly...) and one "mechanic" used to fill the cap with grease. I told him it wasn't necessary and wound be spun out all over the wheel. A futile argument. This was the same guy with applied disc brake quiet to the faces of the pads... Bob
when i was just married i tryed to get along with her family, went to her brother in law for brakes ect. he packed the wheel bearings and took a rag and wiped ALL the grease off!! every last drop! and then put them back in. said that you only need grease in the inside of the bearing. I made some noise about the situation, and one thing he said was "well you know you should pack your bearings every year!" NO ****??? never went back to the bag of wind!!
yea Stu is right. A lot of people were mistaken in the idea that if you put grease in the cap it would some how find its way into the wheel bearings. it used to get done that way a lot. Never hurt anything at all but I doubt if very much if the grease ever found its way into the wheel bearings.
I always put a little grease in the cap because; If the bearing failed and got REALLY hot it's possible the grease in the cap would melt and flow into the failed bearing. Not sure how much further down the road that would get you. Aside from preventing rust that's the only way I see it helping.
Here in the land of salt, rust and humidity, we lightly greased the inside of the cap for a rust preventative. And on caps that were already rusted on the inside, the grease would hopefully hold the rust chunks to keep them from moving into the bearing.
When my dad was first teaching me about performing maintenance on cars and doing jobs such as brakes and greasing wheel bearrings he always put and extra finger full of grease in the cap. He said it wasn't for any service to the bearing at that point but "just in case he was on the road and had to do some kind of work to the car that he needed grease for, he would have it there and know where to find it". Yep, I put a litlle extra grease in the cap "just in case".
EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can usually tell when a redneck has packed the wheels before you got to a rig because the dust caps are full of grease and the hub is full of grease rather than just the bearings being packed as should be. Wheel bearing grease doesn't move around and the grease that a guy puts in the dust cap will be in the dust cap any number of years later when it is pulled again. It doesn't flow out of the middle of the hub to the bearings either.
I kind of agree that filling the cap makes no sense, but doesn't that beg the question why some dust caps come with grease fittings? On a different but related issue, I recently did a disc brake conversion with new hubs and spindles, etc. The manufacturer's instructions called for generous amounts of grease inside the hubs (between the inner and outer bearings). That also makes no sense to me, but I did it anyway.
I have axtually read several service bulletins over the years that suggest that there should be grease between the bearings in the hub. I have never seen any sense in it either. I have even pulled down hubs on cars that I know the hubs have never been off and they had grease between the bearings in the hub. I worked at a trailer place for awhile once that had a bearing packer that packed the bearings once installed in the hubs. There was for sure grease inthe hub on those.
the dust caps with a grease fitting on them are for boat trailers..the intent is to push some grease in there every once in a while to force out any water that may have gotten in there when submerged when launching the boat least thats what I was taught
Alot of farm implements have grease fittings but no brakes. If you over fill with grease thats where it will end up.
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