Sunday, Apr 11, 2010 at 07:52
When bought my first cruiser back in 1974 the manual said to use normal multipurpose grease in the wheel bearings, which we did. When HTB came along in the early eighties we started using it but also found that wheel bearings wore much quicker, sometimes after an extended trip they would be badly marked/pitted after just 20k. I had a mate that ran a mechanical workshop and he used to wash the hubs out for me. When he returned the hubs one time in the early 80's he asked how many k's the cruiser had done and I said 40k as we repacked the wheel bearings every 20k as per Toyota recommendations. He then said
well you need new bearings as these are buggered, same with the trailer, they would be buggered after every outback trip. He then asked what grease I was using, when I said HTB he then said that is why the bearings are buggered, trailer hubs and most 4wd hubs don't get hot enough to melt the grease sufficiently to allow it to flow into the bearings which means they are only ever lubricated by the initial greasing into the rollers.
He gave me a tin of APX and I've never had to replace a bearing since and only every repack every few years on the cruiser and hardly ever on the trailers.
The main reason I've found for repacking is to replace the worn out seals especially when operating in lots of mud and water as the seals do dry out due to contamination.
I suspect that many later model vehicles probably do run a lot hotter in the hubs due to higher weights, smaller metal mass in hubs etc allowing braking heat to transfer to the hub and in turn the hub but I'll stick with the APX as it has served me much better than HTB plus I don't have to repack very often at all. In fact I never wash the bearings out just put them in the bearing repacker, pump new grease in which pushes the old stuff out, wipe the excess off and stick them back in.
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