filmteknik

As some will recall, I've been trying to determine the cause of noise which is very likely a wheel bearing but not 100%. After a lot of research I concluded that I could probably replace a rear hub but would not want to get into the front. A mechanic who did a ride-along with me was fairly certain it was a rear bearing. I've still not been able to pin down the side.

Just to skip ahead, as much as I wanted to DIY I went ahead and took it to the mechanic today.

Part of the reason for waiving the white flag was this.

Today I wanted to do some exploring. Figured maybe I'd get some clue as which side. In fact I'd been toying with the idea of dismantling the left side on speculation and if the hub bearing was bad only then walking to the parts place and getting the replacement. If it looked and felt fine I would just put it back. One reason for suspecting the left is this. Years ago I had a bearing go bad and the paper work is ambiguous. One place it says left rear and another place it says right rear. When I was doing a tire rotation the other day I noticed that on the right side the wheel nut had not had the dimple pounded into the axle shaft groove. At least not very much. So maybe that's the one that was repaired. On left rear, the dimpling into the groove is a lot more. Not so say that the replacement bearing could not have failed but more likely on the older one.

Anyway, I had no plans to get into this today. What I wanted to do was just take off the rear disk as I've never had rears off on this vehicle as I have with the front. Just wanted to look around a bit.

So, jacked up left rear. Removed and hung up caliper. Removed caliper bracket.

Forced the disk off by using 8mm bolts. Bang, when it loosens.

When I did not come right off, in retrospect I should have backed off the parking brake adjuster.

So I wiggled it and took it off. As I take it off the left (towards the front of the car) hold down spring and cup fall to the ground. Studying the situation, I put it back on.
It looks like this:



Okay, fine. So I look at the right (towards the rear).



That cannot possibly be right. First of all the spring is a lot less compressed. And it's going to be in contact with the back of the wheel studs on the hub.

The pin (or whatever you call the thin rod that goes though the spring has a head on the backside which, if broken, could cause this. But, no, it's fine.

The rear pin is not straight like the front one. It has kind of a dog leg jog to it. I presume that's normal but is it?

Anyway, here is the pin with out any spring or cups on it with me pushing on the rear to push it all the way towards me. It will strike the hub. Why would the clearance have changed?



So how can that be? Could the hub & axle shaft have shifted somehow? I'm baffled.

I had to do something just to be able to drive 1/2 mile to the local garage.

So what I did was this.



Yup, I shimmed it with washers as a TEMPORARY expedient. At this point I'm not sure if that picture is rightside up. I didn't use enough washers to keep the spring away from the back of the hub so I added one more after the fact by cutting a slot in one and pushing it in.

Leading to this:



At least it wasn't hitting the hub for the 2.5 block drive. I did tell the garage and showed them the pics.

So while it is now (hopefully) moot what the heck was going on?

filmteknik

Mystery solved.

Mechanic figured it out as he showed me the whole hub replacement procedure. (It was the other side after all.)

While the pin towards the front of the car is straight the one towards the rear has, as I said, a dog leg bend to it.

Apparently my wiggling & angling the disk to remove it (instead of cranking back the parking brake adjuster) caused some of that dog leg bend to be reduced making it a little bit straighter and thus a little longer. A visit to the vice with a few taps of the hammer put some of the angle back in and now it clears just fine.

LeX2K

I've bent those pins many times. Depending on the car you can get a brake kit that includes all the hardware better than using rusty old parts. Did the replacement hub fix the problem?

filmteknik

Yes, he replaced the right rear and the sound is gone. Mechanic was great and walked me through the whole procedure. He even had me climb in while the car was up 3 ft and had me "drive" it so he could locate where the sound was coming from. Even took apart left to verify no issues there. One thing I had toyed with doing was to dismantle, take a hub in my hand and feel for roughness and only then buying the part otherwise putting it back together. (That was not what I was doing when I bent the spring pin; that was just general looking around.) I have to say having the bad one in my hand to rotate and feel, I only felt a little bit of roughness as I turned it. Maybe it was only in the early stages of failure but it was not as blatant as I would have thought. No wonder I could not detect abnormality when I jacked each corner one at a time (car in neutral) and I tried turning each wheel.

I had the same work done some years ago and the invoice was ambiguous--one place it says left rear and another place says right rear. I asked the mechanic if he could tell if the one he took out was OEM or aftermarket. It says something on it but nothing he was expecting from OEM like Toyo. So he believes it was the aftermarket which of course had far less miles on it. Just pulled out that invoice again and there is a more wordy description about replacing right rear while it only says left on the parts list, so yeah, I'm believing the work done in 2013 at 94,790 was on the right so that part failed at less than 80K miles. Not sure who they got parts from but the new one is Duralast from AZ.

This repair, with a tip, was less than one third the cost of the other place.