I cleaned and re-greased them all yesterday. I started on the p***enger side and they both looked good. The bad bearing was on the outer driver side but the inner looked good and spun freely. Can I remove and reinstall the inner seals and races without damaging them?
You should not need to remove the race from the hub, unless you are replacing it. Just make sure to get everything clean, and then to put plenty of grease in. And follow the manual for the adjustment procedure. New grease seals would be good, too.
So I've always used disc bearing grease for discs and drum grease for drums. On these ball bearings, would there be any advantage to using disc grease? Now that I have the t5 in, I'm able to run on the highway at 70 mph or so, which I did the other day for about a half hour. I feel like the bearings will generate more heat at that speed than they did going 50 or whatever speed they were designed to do, so the higher temp rating of the disc bearing grease may help. I'd just hate to spend the money on a new tub of grease for little to zero improvement
I think there is a whole boat load of info out there about bearing speed and grease be it non string or extra stringy meaning how it stays together and follows the rollers. If you look at your bearings the Ball style has less contact surface to race than a Timken style long roller. There in is what dictates the kind of Grease needed for a given bearing. Personally I'd stay with drum brake extra stringy bearing grease in lou of a Molly type. You might read up on recomendations and find I'm all wrong but I don't think actual M.P.H. has much to do with what job the grease is doing. The Wizzard
You might also find that having plenty of clean grease packed into the bearings, is probably more important than which specific type of grease it is. The modern stuff you buy for disc brake wheel bearing grease at the big box store, seems to work ok for me.
I guess I'll stick with drum grease since I have a tub of it. I wonder if there's not a modern, small roller bearing bearing with the same dimensions as the large roller conversion bearing?
There is a topic deserving it's own thread: how to grease wheel bearings. I personally like to pack the whole hub cavity with tons of grease, but I've seen articles where they only pack the bearing, and nothing else. Which is right? And is it the same for rollers and ball bearings?
I pack the bearings, and also add some in the hub on both sides of the bearings, and smear some on the spindle as well. When you take it apart next time, you'll see that some of the grease is dirty, and some of it is still clean, right where you put it. The grease that is dirty was necessary, the grease that hasn't moved probably was not necessary. but add some extra, anyways.
EASIEST way to pop the grease seal out is to remove the outer bearing and race, then thread the spindle nut on a couple turns. Sit on your ****, grab the drum at 3 and 9 o'clock. Pull it towards you in a RAPID motion, sliding along the spindle. The nut will catch on the bearing, pop the seal out slicker than snot, won't damage ether one. OLD trick my dad learned, working in a gas station in the 50's. Put your hands inside a couple bread bags before you repack them - BET on your nose itching or the phone ringing!
Sometimes that trick works well, other times it does tear up the seals, kind of depends how tight they are, and how old they are.
I'm willing to bet these bearings are the originals or close to it anyway. The car had just over 70k on it when I got it. The guy I got it from had a ton of grease in the hubs but who knows how long it was before that
Now you know that's one of the things you need to work on when you get an old car...everything that has lubricant in it, needs to be cleaned and inspected and new lube. Everything. Usually the original ball bearings last a very long time.
Does anyone have the conversion bearing kit, and want measure the inner/outer diameter and width of one of the bearings?
I bought a National bearing at double the price of a Centric bearing to avoid this. Has everyone sold out?
yeah, mostly they've sold out. but I expect the National bearing was probably built to tighter specs than the Centric. I recently bought a spare wheel bearing for my old truck, since I'll be taking a trip. Found a NORS bearing on ebay for a reasonable price. Lately, that's my go to method for finding parts for old cars...
I like doing preventive maintenance and brake work, bearing repacks &c, it's a good chance to really inspect things. Important things. But I only want to do it "once". What don't like doing is going back in to re-do something I half-***ed or cheaped out on. You can usually remove the seals without damage by removing the outer bearing and then replacing the spindle nut and washer, pull the tire back with a quick yank and the seal will pop right off. But they are 5 bucks. Don't cheap out, if the seal fails it'll get bearing grease all over the brake shoes and drums. I know it sounds crazy, but you can learn a lot by reading the shop manual when doing stuff like this. The bearing manufacturers themselves have opinions on how things should be done too. Bearings last almost forever if they are installed correctly, if not, not. RTFM and draw your own conclusions.
Cheap bearings don't last for ****. That's another easy way to have to back in and do it over - **** parts. Problem is while plenty of foreign bearings are of good quality there's no way to tell who was running the melt pot on any given day and whether they were feeding old beer cans into the mix to stretch it out.
Well guys here's the update on the national wheel bearing that I bought. I don't know how many of you guys have bought wheel bearings recently for an old Chevy or any other car for that matter but on top of it being made in China the f-ing bearing cage is made of plastic. This is the first and last time I buy a wheel bearing for this car in anything other than NOS. Of course I couldn't find out it was plastic until I ripped open the plastic wrap that it was in so now there's no refunds. Oh well, I put it in and I'll surely be switching over to roller bearings if for no other reason then to have an all metal wheel bearing again (unless of course I find an NOS bearing for a reasonable price).
The KEY to bearing life is adjusting ball bearings to a SLIGHT pre-load, and servicing them every year or two. Roller bearings have NO PRE-LOAD, with only the slightest amount or no play, as you grasp the tire at 6 and 12. Rollers don't seem to need attention as frequently as ball bearings.
I´ve had the exact same issue as you on my daily driver 55 Chevy. I went through 6 pairs of National ball bearings with plastic insert in about 10 k miles. Only the larger inner ones kept failing. I religiously followed the shop manual which stated to torque the wheel bearings to 33 ft lbs ( if I remember correctly), packed everything full of grease and they kept getting bad on me. I found that the plastic spacer would fail, allowing the balls to ac***ulate at the top of the bearing and working the races and ball to death within a maximum of 2000 miles. With the help of the HAMB and lot of guidance by world famous @squirrel I learned to find 61-68 Chevy full size hubs for drum brake cars because they came with roller bearings and they easily change over. I found them on ebay for about 25 $ , set them up with new roller bearings and seals, adjusted them and never looked back. No more issues for 12k miles since the swap. I don´t know if you can swap your pre 55 spindles to the later hubs, maybe you can just find better quality NOS bearings. But the National bearings ****ed big time. But watch out, the ball bearings need to be torqued down, the tapered rollers are tightend and released, just like normal wheel bearings....here´s the link to my old thread... https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/1955-chevy-front-wheel-bearing-issues.1022324/
We've all been using oil seals that have been made in Mexico for decades. I never had a problem with one. A plastic bearing cage is not acceptable to me.
When I opened the package it blew my mind. I'm either converting to rollers or swapping to discs this winter.
The Jalopy Journal
