Do worn wheel bearings affect brake performance?

the wheel bearing may affect the 'grab' of that brake, but you might not notice in normal use, so yes, the bearing may well sort both problems, but ....... You won't know till you fix it. A friend of mine has a Passat with

300k on the clock, he went through front wheel bearings quite quickly till he found a better make. Unfortunately I am not in touch with him at present, so I can't find out the make. The originals lasted well though, so if they are not ludicrously over priced get genuine.

Wow, A speedy reply Mr Cheerful....

The VW price for original bearings is £40.45p which is actually not that much more than Eurocarparts or GSF.

I'm happy to get the VW bearing at that price.

I would normally do my own car maintenace but the biggest challenge for me is getting the old bearing out..Taking it out breaks the bearing in two, so leaving one half to extract out of the wheel hub/ABS sensor assembly, and one half out of the hub carrier. And of course pushing in the new bearing.

VW have quoted two hours labour, and are offering 12.5% discount off the bearing and 20% off their labour rates as apparently the older the car is, the bigger the discount gets..... making it 214 quid all in. Isn't that age discriminantion? :-)

I've looked online for a bearing tool but cant seem to find the right one let alone the right place. I found a forum in the states where golf owners hire the special tool....

So what do I do, pay the VW dealer or buy the tool to use as a one off and then flog on Ebay or keep for the next bearing job?

Still seems a low mileage for a bearing to go

Stephen

most garages would just use a general purpose press to change the bearing, if you can remove the relevant bits then most places would probably press the bearing in and out for less than twenty quid.

You can get a large puller kit to remove the bearing in situ, Sykes want= =

about =A3300 (08120000), Sealey(VS7020/vs7021) about =A3150, last time I= =

pushed one out the hydraulic press read 8T before it moved so I'd go wit= h =

Mr Cheerfulls suggestion

How is a car supposed to brake in a straight line if the wheels are wobbling all over the place ffs?

I would say that with the bearing having movement this would force the pads to retract and give a soft peddle till the pads contacted the rotor again. So the peddle would vary.

Talking of bearings, as a materials scientist, i just remembered who makes the best quality bearings, its a firm called SKF in the Netherlands

There is a specific compostion of iron alloy which not surprisingly called bearing steel that SKF's bearings are made from.

Regards

Stephen

SKF are made in various countries. Do they all use the same materials or the same specifications in manufacture?

You ask if it is normal for bearings to fail after only 70K. Well, in normal use, everything else being okay, then this is unlikely. But wheel bearings can go extremely quickly if they are subjected to repetitive stress. A badly balanced wheel, for instance, will ruin a wheel bearing.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Stephen" saying something like:

From my experience as a user and maker, the best made are Toyo. I used to make the balls in a local plant - SKF are good, no doubt about it, but the tolerances demanded by Toyo were tighter than those accepted by SKF. RHP were the worst.