Front Wheel Bearing Upgrade Options?

[popo_patty]

80,000 miles on my 21 with 37’s. Original wheel bearings no issues still. LOTS of heavy off-road miles. Lots and lots and lots

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[87-Z28]

Of course. My comments were not about your post but more general.

Your analysis of the bearing moments is accurate just not complete. The applied moments are the force (normal force acting on tire contact patch centroid) times a moment arm. The full moment arm distance needs to include the vector addition (direction matters) of 1) the distance from wheel centerline to the bearing centerline (as you stated and have calculated). But also 2) the scrub radius.

Moments generated by the scrub radius are superimposed onto the wheel bearing. These moments are reacted by the upper and lower ball joints (which are pinned) thus the knuckle must react this bending moment via the wheel bearings.

@illverado

EDIT. Correction to be more concise.

Under static loads.

As far as the ball joints are concerned, their reaction forces are dictated by the scrub radius moment arm and they don’t care where the wheel bearing is located. Wheel/knuckle acts as a rigid body.

As far as the wheel bearings are concerned, the applied moment arm is always necessarily the distance between wheel centerline and bearing centerline. Which is dictated solely by wheel offset. This distance always includes the scrub radius plus or minus the distance from king pin/ground contact to bearing centerline. It is therefore more concise to consider wheel bearing moment arm as simply the distance from wheel centerline to bearing centerline.

 

[PickleRick93]

I think you are the only one I can recall having a bearing failure really. I'm sure there are some more around here, but it just doesn't seem to be that wide spread.

Another thread was started here about a month ago for front wheel bearing failure. Between Facebook and Reddit there are another half dozen, nearly all with sub 50k miles . I joined here in hopes of possibility finding an upgrade I couldn't find during my Google search. Luckily it's an easy repair. Took about two hours on the first wheel, about an hour on wheel number two. This is on a jack and jack stand outside the shop on a crutch with one leg currently in a straight brace.

I'll update when/if these rock auto sourced bearings fail. I need to get a set of timkin on order to have here at the shop ready to go if I need them.


The hardest part of the install was the torquing of the wheel hub mounting bolts. One of the lowers is impossible to reach with a 1/2" torque wrench. Other than that this is a 1 banana basic hand tool job.

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