Re: Repost on wheel bearings for Sebring

On Aug 9, 6:10 pm, Steve B. wrote:

Steve, nice reply...by the way, I did have all of the correct tools for this project, including the star sockets. Maybe I'm just having a bad day after trying to save myself a few hundred bucks? Its funny how american car manufacturers continually pump out crap, back it with crap warranties, and then cry the blues when their companies profits start sagging. God forbid you make a good car, have a good warranty, and make it a little easier to service. I realize that nothing is warrantied forever, and eventually somethings are going to break, but lets make it a little more easier for the "every day guy" to be able to service it. Is it possible that YOU are able to remember when you could crawl inside an engine compartment, shut the hood, and still work on the engine? Do you remember when changing a light bulb didn't involve taking four additional parts off of the car just to get to it? Or how about not having to jack your car up, turn the wheel, and remove fender panels to get to an oil filter? And as long as we are talking wheel bearings, I suppose somehow its better today to buy a $70-$100 sealed bearing hub assembly that is supposed to last many miles longer than 50,000, than to have the old conventional wheel bearings that just need repacking or replacing for $20? By the way, why do I need a special socket to get three ordinary bolts out? Am I missing something? Do they somehow work differently than other bolts? Couldn't they have put in a regular bolt? Probably not, seeing as everything else is a mix of standard and metric, lets throw in another one and charge the shmuck another $8 bucks for the special socket. Why would I expect to find a standard bolt on my american car so I could go over to my craftsman toolbox and pull out a standard socket. Yeah, that would be easy. I wasted alot of time researching on the net for this project and found very little, if any, useful information. Unless I was looking in the wrong place (very possible) I couldn't find any kind of service manual on line or any kind of exploded view diagrams of what all of these parts look like. I ended up purchasing a "Haynes" manual for this car that really looks like it was written and photographed by a grade school kid. I'm sure that the reason their book sucks is because the manufacturer probably didn't forward enough info to them. Like I said before, I'm just pissed now. This entire deal ultimately came down to three bolts that won't come off for me. I could waste more of my time and sit under the car tomorrow and wrench on those things, but they aren't coming off for me. I'll end up tearing the heads apart and making it worse in the end. This job will need the car up on a lift (by the way, I don't have one of those in my garage), pneumatic tools (don't have them either), and probably a torch to heat the bolts up. My point was that this should have been a fairly easy and straightforward job, but because of clever engineering my day tomorrow will be spent at the dealer's shop. And by the way, thanks for the heads up on the foreign manufacturers tightening their bolts too. I'll find that out on my next vehicle though, but I doubt before 100,000 miles.

An oa torch is required for some of these.

If you didn't have an impact wrench, you didn't have the correct tools.

If cars were easy to service and lasted forever, people wouldn't buy new ones. Then GM would go out of business, and the American economy would collapse. Millions of people would be out of work, and Americans would be floooding across the border into Mexico to find work.

--scott