Replacing Front Wheel Bearing Hub on 2008 Prius

Hello All,
I am new posting to the forum, but have been reading for years.

Our 2008 Prius (Gen 2) was making a loud whining noise characteristic of bad wheel bearings at 80,000 miles, so we took it to the local Toyota dealership to have them check it out. They ended up suggesting several pieces of maintenance:

1. Replacement of both front wheel bearing hubs. $1204 ($364 parts)
2. Replacement of our water pump, which was apparently leaking, along with the drive belt. $408 ($145 parts)
3. An invertor flush, which is recommended every 100,000 miles or 6 years. Our Prius is 6.5 years old. $129
4. Throttle cleaning due to some oil in the intake manifold. $163
5. Alignment of the rear brake drums. $79

After some research, we ended up deciding to let them replace the water pump as that can be a big job and was worth the cost of them doing it. We also had them do the rear brake alignment, despite the fact that we had no idea what they were talking about. It ended up making a difference in the parking brake, which is now harder to push in, but seems more secure.

As for item #3, our service manual suggests this at 100,000 miles or after 10 years, so we decided to hold off on this. All my reading on the forums suggest there is no need for this until later unless you see a color change, which we do not.

The other items, we decided to do ourselves. We had previously replaced the brake pads and rotors ourselves and this job seemed to only be one more step from that. The dealership said it would take 4 hours per wheel bearing hub, which is pretty pricey.

Here are the steps we took to replace the front wheel bearing hubs.

We purchased these from Advanced Auto Parts and used a coupon that gave us $50 off a $100+ purchase. I bought one and so did my husband. This brought the cost of each wheel bearing hub to $95, which seems pretty good. We decided to buy the hubs as that would not require a press, which we didn’t have.

Also, we did this job with 2 large guys and 1 small woman. Many of the jobs could not have been completed without 2 large guys that could pull and hammer on these things with all their might.

Tools/Equipment:

• wheel bearing hub (purchased from Advanced Auto Parts)
• wheel bearing puller (rented for FREE from Advanced Auto Parts)
• slide hammer (rented for FREE from Advanced Auto Parts)
• various sockets and wrenches, mostly 10mm thru 21mm
• breaker bar
• hammer
• chisel, screwdriver, and/or punches
• pneumatic tools
• 30 mm 12 pointed socket
• wire to hang these up with

Time: 12 hours (4 hours of this would have been saved if we had just taken it to NAPA Auto Parts earlier)

1. Parking brake is on, the car is in park, and the key is located far away from the vehicle.
2. Disconnect the 12V battery.
   • It is located in the trunk near the spare tire.
   • We just disconnected the negative. It is a black cable. There were some sparks that came off as we were disconnecting this.
   • This job required a ratchet with a 10mm socket and some rubber gloves.
   • Also, once you unhook the battery, don’t close the trunk as you can’t open it without the power.
3. Loosen the lug nuts on the front wheels.
4. Jack up the car and place jackstands.
   • These need to be placed on the jack points, Don’t jack up on the axle as you may need to disengage the axle and that could be bad news!!
5. Remove the wheel.
6. Remove the caliper.
   • Uses a 17mm socket and a breaker bar.
   • Hang caliper up with some wire.
7. Remove rotor, which is now loose.
8. Remove speed sensor.
   • Requires 10mm socket.
   • Also hang this up out of the way with the caliper.
9. Remove the axle nut.
   • We had to hammer and pry up the dent in the bolt. This took a screw driver/punch and a hammer and some time.
   • After pounding out the indent, we used a 30mm 12 point socket on the end of a pneumatic tool. We were worried that we might be damaging the axle threading when we were doing this, but it worked very well.

OK, so at this point, you will need to make a decision. If your hub is not rusted on and will be easy to remove, you should leave the knuckle on the vehicle. If it is corroded and stuck on, you will want to remove the whole knuckle.

In our case, we tried removing the 4 mounting bolts and leaving the knuckle on. In our case, this was a poor decision. We tried a PB Blaster, slide hammer, blow torch, air chisel, and even a pneumatic saw with no luck! We could have saved ourselves many hours of trying if we just took off the knuckle and had NAPA Auto Parts machine shop separate the hub from the knuckle. It took them 15 minutes and $20 per knuckle/hub combo!

1. Loosen, but don’t remove, the knuckle-to-strut bolts.
   • The guide we used also mentioned to mark the strut to knuckle relationship, but this didn’t end up mattering to us.
2. Remove the tie rod from the knuckle.
   • Remove the cotter pin on the end of the castle nut that is connecting the knuckle to the tie rod. This should just pull out. Some people suggest replacing these, but we reused ours.
   • Then we loosened the jam nut on the tie rod. We weren’t sure that this was necessary, but thought it might create more movement to help with the rest of the removal. This required two wrenches and once we got it loose, we marked the relationship of the tie rod to the threading.
   • Next, we used a socket wrench to take off the castle nut. This may or may not have required the use of a pneumatic tool.
   • Finally, we disconnected the tie rod from the knuckle using a “pickle fork”. Unfortunately, we ended up breaking the grease cover/dust cover/bladder on the end of the tie rod. Luckily, this can be easily repaired with a $6 universal dust cover and some grease!
3. Remove the balljoint-to knuckle bolt (1) and nuts (2) for a total of 3 pieces.
   • These are on the bottom of the knuckle and were pretty easy to take off. You do not need to remove the castle nut!
4. Finish removing the two bolts on the top of the knuckle holding it to the strut.
5. At this point, the axle should come out and you should support it with a piece of wire.
   • The axle did not come out for us. We pounded on with a hammer, no budge. We put the strut bolts back in and ended up using the slide hammer to rip the front part of the wheel bearing hub off. You need lug nuts that don’t have a rim on them to fit on the wheel hub puller you can rent. That freed the axle!
6. Once you have the knuckle free from the vehicle, take a different car to your local machine shop (NAPA Auto Parts for us) and have them remove the knuckle from the hub.
   • Make sure to mark the brake dust shield so you know which side faces out.
   • The machine shop can also clean up the erosion and dust they are bound to find between the knuckle and hub.
7. Clean up the bolts and nuts you have pulled out in this time.
8. Re-assemble the NEW hub, brake dust shield, and knuckle.
   • 14mm socket.
9. Guide the knuckle and hub assembly onto the axle.
   • The most important part for us was to make sure we got the lower part of the knuckle so that the 2 nuts and 1 bolt could be put in, while also making sure the axle was coming through the center of the hub.
10. Everything else is in reverse, but don’t tighten things until you have everything connected.
    • A chisel and a hammer worked great for getting the indent back on the axle nut once it was in place.
    • Our ball joint at the end of our tie rod was rotating so we couldn’t tighten the castle nut with a regular ratchet. We ended up using a pneumatic ratchet to get it tightened. Once tightened, we could use a torque wrench without the bolt rotating on us.

 

Thanks.

We did not install new axle nuts as I found mixed reviews on whether it was needed. Ours were not stripped and we dented it back in when we put it back on. Do you know why some people recommend new axle nuts?

We probably could have installed the water pump, but the price was reasonable and we were taking on the job of the wheel hubs, so it was worth the money.