Another bad wheel bearing

Make sure that your replacement is the new approved roller bearing. It has been stated that the ball is good but the assembly procedure distorted the bearing race causing some failures. My 2000 Forester with rear balls has

Folks are replacing those with a Legacy bearing that is roller, not ball (IIRC). I believe someone posted the part#s on the forum at

.If it doesn't show in a search there, maybe someone here knows?

There is also real possibility of damaging the new bearing when it is installed, very tricky. Also, to make matters worse, there is some controversy about replacing the shipping grease or not.

if you want to cover all the bases, try searching at

and too.

Print out the pertinent stuff, take it back to your dealer, and tell them to fix it right this time.

Carl

1 Lucky Texan

Shane Brittle wrote:

sounds like it was not installed correctly. bearing pre-load and final torque is very important

Hi, could you explain a little more what you mean by «bearing pre-load»? Thanks in advance. Gilles

I would suspect that the previous install was faulty as when Subaru replaced my left front at 80K and the replacement lasted only 20k more, just enough to get me out of my 100k Subaru Gold warranty.

Hi,

Please let me ask a stupid question: does Subaru NOT believe in grease in their wheel bearings?

Here's why I ask--

I see lots of stories and tech bulletins and so forth about Subie wheel bearing issues. I won't get into what IMO is the ridiculous idea of continuing to use ball bearings in apps where rollers have proven to be more appropriate, but will relate my own anecdotal experience.

My '90 Loyale 4wd wagon has rollers in the back, balls in the front. I bought it used with 209k miles, and the previous owner was less than religious about his maintenance. The owner's manual specs wheel bearing inspections and regreasing as necessary at 60k mi (approx 100k km) intervals. Being a bit of a dummy, I didn't catch that, so it was at over 300k miles when I started getting a little play in the right rear wheel and inspected the bearings. That RR bearing was bone dry, to the point of having that "red rust dust" coming out. The LR had only a tiny bit of grease, both the fronts "enough" but hardly "too much." Compared to other cars I've worked on with similar mileage, all of these bearings appeared to have been "underlubed" from the start.

I added grease to all four, made a note to replace the dry one ASAP and went on. Well, "ASAP" turned into 10k miles plus before the bearing actually broke but even so I limped home on it. I replaced it at home, using "homemade" tools, and later replaced the fronts "just cuz" when I replaced axles. They weren't noisy, didn't have any play, but the front end was half apart anyway, so might as well do it all at once. The LR is still doing fine. The car now has 343k miles.

All this makes the idea of distorted housings and all that, while not impossible, perhaps improbable compared to the possibility of inadequate lubrication even on new cars or those replacement installations where it is warned NOT to add grease to whatever comes in the package.

Any thoughts?

Rick

sometimes you hand assemble the bearing assembly. put everything into place after you have pregreased all the outer and inner races next you use an inch pound torque meter to compress everything to maybe 100 inch pounds for an example. next you relax the bearing assembly to zero or loose next you final tighten the bearing to maybe 20 inch pounds for example of illustration. preload just aligns the parts final sets to correct amount. my values are for example only see the manual for the correct values