Replaced the roasted rear wheel bearing last night, Erik come over to offer ‘murican car tech support and assure me that everything would be fine. The old wheel bearing machined a 1/16th” groove into the axle which explained the excessive wheel play and horrible misbehavior under braking. New axles are around $150 which is far too much money to spend on beast van. I opted for a “repair bearing” which uses an offset housing to move the bearing to a new location on the stub axle.
It’s definitely a half assed fix so I’ll be looking for a good used 8.8 rear end to replace this one.
All of my tools are tailored to working on them ‘ferrin cars so I didn’t have the correct puller or slide hammer attachments to remove the old bearing race. Trick I learned from the ever helpful internet: remove the rollers from the race and weld a bead around the inside of said race, as the weld cools it shrinks allowing the race to be removed easily. Very nifty.
I used a couple of shop rags taped to a length of flat bar to wipe most of the steel shavings from the axle tube. Erik didn’t take any pictures of this process nor did we sing the chimney sweep song from Mary Poppins. I don’t know why not.
Test drove the van, no weird noises from the rear end, joy. Failed to do a burnout, sadness.
