Wheel bearing or tire noise? Subtopic tire recommendation please.

Steering to the left will increase the load on both right-side wheels - front and rear.

Feel the hub temperatures after a longish run with minimal braking.

Both sides should be about the same temperature, with the front hubs being warmer than the rear. A noisy wheel bearing will cause that hub to run hotter.

Maybe you haven't considered these, but can you find some Continental EcoContact 3 tyres?

John

Thanks John, That makes sense, centripetal force puts weight on both outside bearings, front and rear. I just came back from 500 km trip and when we stopped for a break, Driving was all hwy speeds with no braking. I checked the temp of the steel wheels (proxy for hub temp). Both front wheels on both sides were cool. When we got home and I checked again, the wheels were quite warm, I'm guessing from braking on the off-ramp and braking in the city. Seems the bearings aren't running hot.

I had some Continentals that were the original tires on the 1990 Golf and they cupped badly so rightly or wrongly, have since avoided Continentals. Incidentally, on the pre-trip check, I noticed a bulge in the tread of one of the 8 year old Yokohama Avid Touring tires. I did some checking around for availability and there were a pair of Michelin Harmony's in a city 1/2 hour out on the route so got those the morning of the trip. They ran great and seemed to have a slightly smaller diameter as compared to my GPS speed readout, the speedometer was reading about 7-8 km/hr faster than GPS. With the old tires the difference was about 6 km/hr faster on the speedo compared to GPS.

An aside, we have been doing this trip 8-10 times a year for the last

20 years with this same car. We take the exact same route (only one hwy so no choice) and the mileage from the last stop to home was 152 km with the new tires whereas with the old tires, it was consistently 148 km. This is conjecture, but I wonder if this is how some tire manufacturer's can generate "fuel savings" by slightly decreasing the tire size so the odometer reads higher for the same gas consumption, therefore a better apparent gas mileage. For my one trip, this is a 2.7% difference in odometer reading which translates into a 2.7% improvement in fuel economy assuming I consumed the same quantity of fuel.

Hi, an update. I changed out the right front wheel bearing and the droning noise is gone. Yay. What I learned:

- Others (Dave aka vwdoc1) suggested this elsewhere-when rotating a bearing on the car to check for noise, take everything off the hub. Initially I raised the car and spun the tires. Bearing sounded like the other side. Only when I was replacing the bearing that when I spun the hub I could hear and feel the roughness in the bearing. It was definitely shot. So, take the tire/rim off the hub before spinning. Take brake caliper off if brake pad drag muffles the bearing noise.

- Bearing noise sure can sound like tire tread noise. I was convinced the problem was the tires. So don't discount bad bearings in the diagnosis.

- To free the hub/bearing carrier, just need to remove the horizontal ball joint clamp bolt and push the control arm down. I made the mistake of starting to take the 3 bolts off the ball joint and sheared off two bolts. I ended up replacing the ball joint.

- I was pretty gentle with the slide hammer taking the hub out. Instead of splitting the bearing as I expected, the hub came right out of the bearing! That was easy and saved the time to get the remains of the bearing inner race off the hub.

- Get the best snap ring pliers you can find/afford. Those snap rings are hard to take out and get back in, especially the inside one. Of the individual tasks, the snap rings took the longest to get out and back in.