Diagnosing bad wheel bearing

My wheels make some noise but it's hard to tell. They don't have any play in them. But the tire wear tells me they're bad. After all the other suspension parts changed and alignment they still wear the inside and out of the tires.

L

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No tire wear is not coming from your wheel bearings If it is you'd be able to pick up that wheel jack the car up and grab the top and the bottom of the wheel 12 and 6 and be able to create a noticeable clunk clunk back and for eighth of an inch or better play I've seen that in only old style wheel bearings that are way before the Prius these Bolt on kind generally these antics don't go on they get to making way too much noise before they completely fall apart but a friend of mine blew one up the other day but he's known as need to be changed for over a year and he drove it until it overheated the hub and the hub plate with the wheel studs literally came out the front of the hub and messed everything up and just made a mess out of the car wouldn't cost me anything because I have all the stuff sitting here on another car to slap on it in a few minutes but this guy paid about $15 $1,600 because he wasn't at home. By the TRQ wheel bearings they're 89 or $90 a set delivered to your door I keep a set of hubs loaded with the TRQ bearings and TRQ lower ball joints sitting here ready to go every time I get a generation too that's one of the first changes the car gets New front hubs bearings lower ball joints and if the shocks are bad I go ahead and I have a set of those sitting around not just eliminates all the hubbub like immediately I hate doing the rears because you got to take the inside of the panels all out and battery bracketry just to get to the rear shocks really stinks put some spacers in the rears . Use the cut above the medium quality for the rear shocks so you don't have to do them again and the spacers in the back pick the car up enough so you can climb in and out of it easily enough and you're good to go No need to buy $150 to $200 a piece bearings just no point.

 

If you jack up the entire front—both wheels off the ground—you can spin a front wheel. The other front wheel will just spin the other direction. Or, you can turn the car just ON (two button pushes, no brake) and shift to N.

But it can be a bit hard to spin a front wheel by hand freely enough to pick out a bearing issue. You're either spinning the wheel, both driveshafts, the differential, and the other wheel, or you're in neutral and you're spinning the wheel and one driveshaft and the differential and both MGs in the transaxle.

My best success in pinning down a bearing issue was to use a ChassisEar—a remote speaker with several pickups you can clamp next to the four wheel bearings and go for a drive and listen. Setting it up took a few minutes but making the call took just seconds. If you can borrow or somehow get access to one of those, it makes the job easy.

 

And down at the tire place or wherever you are this diagnosis is going to cost you a good bit because that's how it is now You buy the TRQ bearings you need three sockets a hammer and you can do it all by hand if you want to I do it pretty regularly even though I have electric and air tools stuff comes apart pretty easily unless you're in the rust belt and you're changing these wheel bearings and any of the other parts you have and want to change on that side like the strut the lower wheel bearing that goes to the control arm and the end links You can do all this 45 minutes aside in the front without question even without experience If you can get the car jacked up and stands in place the rest is easy You don't even have to think about it most of the nuts and bolts only can go in one place so you can just throw them on the ground right where you're working. Seriously take a picture if you need to you'll be shocked I used to think all these things about this stuff 20-30 years ago and now I'll tear a tractor or combine apart I don't care

 

use a floor jack to raise both wheels up (there's a jack point in front of the car) and they will rotate freely. You can try shaking the wheel with traditional way. of 3-9 and 12-6 (vertical and horizontal) but most of these bearings don't have play (in my experience) The bearings are just pitted inside making a grinding sound. I usually spin the wheel and at the same time feel the coil spring and from there determine which side has some roughness.

 

If you're going to replace one wouldn't most people replace both at the same time? So once you've decided it is a front wheel bearing is there really even any point in figuring out which one? Once they are off the car it should be easy to tell, if you still care.

 

There are schools of thought on that. Me, I replace the one that has worn out.

People in the "do 'em all" school generally argue that the bearings are made with the same mean-time-to-failure and they've all been on the car the same number of miles, so if one has failed the others are failing soon.

Thing is, though, the M in MTTF is 'mean', the average, one point in a statistical distribution, and the distribution can be pretty wide around that mean. In my gen 1, I replaced one wheel bearing at 9 years / 160,000 miles, and the next one to go was 3 years and 50,000 miles later, and I never had to touch the other two as long as I had the car.

I'm seeing the same kind of thing with tire pressure sensors: the battery in one of mine pooped out a little more than two years ago. These sensors are another case where people often say "they use the same battery and they've been on the car the same amount of time, change 'em all!".

But only just now am I having to replace a second one—and it's not even clear the battery is the reason! It was in a tire that just got destroyed by a rock and replaced at a Walmart, and it was working right up until that happened, and it may well have just been crunched by the Walmart tire machine.

The other part of the judgment call is: how much labor do you save by changing more than one at the same time? You probably wouldn't ever change just one crankshaft bearing, because the amount of engine teardown to get there is the biggest part of the job and repeating it would be nuts, so once you're in there you change 'em all.

But replacing two wheel bearings is just pretty much two separate wheel bearing jobs; just raising the car is pretty much the only work step you stand to save by combining the jobs. (Tire sensors, same deal: to replace one requires taking a wheel off, breaking the bead, swapping the sensor, reinflating, and remounting the wheel; to replace four requires doing all of that, four times.)

At that rate, I may as well just do what needs done, and wait to do the next when it needs done, which may well never happen in the time I end up having the car. The cash I didn't spend continues earning interest until there's a reason to spend it, and if I'm done with the car first, then I never spent it.

The other piece, of course, is how critical would a failure be? It makes sense to replace things very proactively if their failure would be catastrophic. A wheel bearing generally makes noise for a long time before anything leaves the car, giving plenty of time to fix it, and a tire pressure sensor can be done without indefinitely, so there's not a lot of downside to the wait-and-see approach.

 

The wheels need weight on them because mine don't have play off the ground but you can hear play driving over certain small bumps. Plus driving on the highway the wheels don't track 100% straight which requires more wheel correction going straight. It doesn't pull and drives straight but you find yourself correcting more than a new car that's for sure
After 295,000 miles on mine those bearings are worn out.

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