niose in wheel well area

not like anyone here was a big help but it was a bad wheel bearing

Hmm, mine makes some odd noises, perhaps I should check mine.

it sounds alot like a broken shock mount

I intended to just tighten the wheel bearings, if they needed it. When I first got this truck back in 92 and did the first wheel bearing repack I was worried I'd mess up something with the whole 4x4 autohubs and went thru the whole thing with the repair book in front of me and spent most of the day repacking the wheel bearings. So this time when I was just going to check the bearings and make sure they were adjusted I found that to get to the adjusting nut I had to pull some parts off first. After 60 seconds I had pulled off all the "complicated" stuff I was so worried about touching 10 years ago. By this point I had the front bearing out to check it for wear and figured I might was well just repack it all. It's amazing how easy it was now that it was the third time I've done it and how quickly it went. The biggest amount of time was the time it took to clean up the old grease off things and repack with new grease. Never did find anything really wrong but it was definitely time for a bearing repack, the old grease was starting to get hard from the high temp, I think I used the wrong grease last time.

Ain't that the truth? I do all kinds of things myself and save a ton of money, but after buying the special tools, studying the manuals, searching rec.autos.makers.ford.explorer for pearls of wisdom from you guys, and getting it done... I'm ready to do it again, now that I'm good at it!

-Paul