So, I put around 100,000 miles on my truck every year. I will now have to replace my front wheel hubs for the third time since I have on the truck and we are going on 2.5 years. Is it safe to say that I meeting life expectancy of these bearings? Or am I buying crappy wheel hub assemblies? I currently hit 300,000 miles since I bought the truck.
This is on a 2008 GMC Sierra 2500HD.
I believe wheel bearing quality has taken a nosedive since Y2K.
My belief is based solely on the guy at the FLAPs balking at me when I asked for cheap bearings for my 3/4 ton Dodge. He talked me into better bearings, they're still fine, but I don't even have 10K on them.
YRMV
100k miles seems like a pretty good amount, I wouldn't be unhappy about that. Just unlucky you're doing that in 1 year vs the 8-9 years the average American takes to do it
I have had bad luck with aftermarket bearings unless they are from the OEM supplier like Koyo. Where are you getting them from? If it isnt an immediate need, I have found OEM part prices to be reasonable shopping around on the internet.
Seems about right to me. I've done wheel bearings on my 120k 2005 Sequoia already. DId them twice on my WRX (170k miles total).
If I told you how often I change wheel bearings on the rally car, you'd feel much better. Hint: probably ever couple thousand miles lol....
While I am a frequent defender of Chinese products, I believe there are a lot of low quality Chinese bearings out there. I was involved in potentially resourcing some bearings to China about 15 years ago. Every time we tested their bearings they failed in some way. Frequently various forms of the case hardening on the needles failing then galling the race. What was most concerning was the request that come back after many failures. 'Tell us the result you want and we'll give it to you' Not, let's build it to the specs, but we'll manufacture the results you are looking for and call it good.
NOTE I am not knocking Chinese products in general. Most of the crap that people complain about from China is crap because it's built down to the lowest possible price at the request of the customer and so you get what you pay for. I am sure that there are vendors in China that can build quality bearings of any type to any spec people are looking for. Just don't expect them to be pennies on the dollar, especially after freight costs. The Chinese can and do build anything and everything to the highest quality if people are willing to pay for it, but as a society we are more interested in 'more' than 'quality' Let's remember only three Nations have put people in space. In order they are Russia, the United States and China. Europe only managed it as a joint effort....end rant.
Front wheel bearings on a GM truck every ~100k sounds about right to me.
About right and maybe pretty darn good depending on the bearings you're using. These are the regular GM unit bearings that come on/off with three bolts? At least the job is easy if they are.
It’s probably a little bit of both.
Biggest problem with premature failure is that you do NOT impact the spindle nut on. I’ve had much better luck maybe getting it snug with and impact and a final torque to the insane 170ft.lbs.
That being said, I get about 150-175k out of a set on my gms. And that’s using skf or moogs as replacements.
My Malibu was picky about bearings. GM units would go about 100k, aftermarkets about 45-50. Like Ranger50 said proper torque is very important, and occasionally the new bearings would have revised specs in the package so be sure to check that you’re tightening them correctly as well.
That seems typical. We have a '14 Suburban at work and had to replace one just under 100k and I have noticed a noise in the past few days that sounds like a bearing and I just turn 148k the other day. I had an '04 Yukon that I replaced the left front twice in the 120K that I owned it, lucked out that the second one was under warranty still. At least they aren't too hard to swap out.
wheelsmithy said:I believe wheel bearing quality has taken a nosedive since Y2K.
My belief is based solely on the guy at the FLAPs balking at me when I asked for cheap bearings for my 3/4 ton Dodge. He talked me into better bearings, they're still fine, but I don't even have 10K on them.
YRMV
Trucks have also gotten heavier and the standard wheel/tire packages used are larger diameter, which can put greater stresses on the front bearings when turning.
You're not going to find a 235/75R15 on the front of a 3/4 ton anymore.
Ive never tried on a GM bearing, but I wonder how hard it would be to pop it apart and repack with a better grease. That's what I did with the sealed bearings in our Civic Champcar and I know Miata guys do it too.
All the mentions above about proper torque remind me of something that happened in my dealer tech days. The guy who worked beside me was doing his third warranty bearing on the same wheel. All 3 replacements were done within a month or so and he was grumbling about how "there must be a bad batch at the PDC". I noticed he was using the his recently purchased Ultra Mega Torque Snap-co-well Indestructo 1/2 impact with kung-fu grip to tighten the 32mm nut that only had a spec of around 130 or so. He zapped it tight and gave it a couple more hits when I talked him into using a torque wrench on it. It stayed out of his bay after that. He was a bit of a gorilla in everything he did but that always stuck out to me because of how much complained about a bearing only making it a week.
It's funny to hear all of the talk about over-torquing spindle nuts on unit bearings. I've seen some live slightly short lives after being impact gunned on, but I've seen far more fail from being under-torqued and leading to the bearing self destructing and developing a lot of play with little warning (including the one time I did one on the Jeep and used a torque wrench).
On the Jeep, the longest bearing life has always come from the ones I tightened by putting a socket and 18" ratchet on it and standing / jumping on the ratchet until it doesn't tighten any further (I weigh about 160). Impact gunned bearings seem to fail a bit sooner, but they fail safely (noise before play).
In reply to SyntheticBlinkerFluid :
Is your 2500HD a Duramax or 6.0L? Modern diesel pickups absolutely murder the front suspensions due to the weight over the front axle. Even if your truck is the 6L, I'd say 100k on a set of front hub assemblies is pretty good.
If you think of it this way, most people put about 15k miles a year on their vehicles. That's about 7 years to reach 100k.
logdog said:Ive never tried on a GM bearing, but I wonder how hard it would be to pop it apart and repack with a better grease. That's what I did with the sealed bearings in our Civic Champcar and I know Miata guys do it too.
I thought about doing that with the “extra” set I have here. Thought I had a bad wheel speed sensor but didn’t and swapped them out.
But I was going to pony up and either put in MicroBlue bearings or just make my wallet weep with ceramic ones.
In reply to logdog :
The first replacements were done by a local shop I no longer use. They failed in 25,000 miles and the spindle nuts were difficult to remove. Six of the ten studs also broke removing the tires.
The Chevy is at least designed for failure -- IE the front bearing/hub assy is at least easy to remove and replace, held on with just 4 bolts. The nets you new studs and typically an ABS sensor as well.
Potholes are murder on bearings, so I'd say 100k +/- 25k depending on your driving conditions is right. I hit a good size pothole in my old 2500hd and both the bearings on that side were toast within 5k miles.
I think there's a lot more to wheel bearing life than just proper installation, although that is super important too. All kinds of factors play into this like how the vehicle is loaded, how it's driven, road quality, driving on gravel/dirt/sand/salt and the potential for seal failure in those environments. Everything on your car has a designed life span and I wouldn't be surprised if the OEMs design bearings to do at least 100k miles. Beyond that designed life span, whatever it is, everything else is just a bonus. At least most cars' wheel bearings are bolt on nowadays and are pretty trouble free as long as they're not rusted to the knuckle.
As an anecdote, my dad's 2000 Silverado 1500 has 200k miles on the original wheel bearings (and front brake pads and rotors too!)
I have noticed on modern cars with big, stiff wheel bearings it's much more difficult to diagnose if they're going bad. Basically you have to just go by noise unless they are literally falling apart. I changed the noisy rear bearings in an Outback that had absolutely no discernible play or nothcyness in them. I couldn't actually prove they were bad until I removed them and pulled the seals. Only then could I feel the dents in the races and the play in them.
In reply to freetors :
150k miles is the design window.
I must have been lucky, but my 02 diesel k3500 had 165k miles on it when I sold it and the bearings where still good.
For those interested, my truck is Diesel and I pull travel trailers to dealers all over the country, so I see many different road surfaces. I could tell you what states have the best roads and worst roads, I have driven into many potholes and ball joints are next on my list for replacement.
Cotton said:I must have been lucky, but my 02 diesel k3500 had 165k miles on it when I sold it and the bearings where still good.
Da Boss's K1500 had one original bearing at 280k. It was a little loose but it wasn't noisy or causing any low speed ABS activation issues, but we replaced it anyway because we were replacing the other side for a low speed activation problem.
Also has all original ftont end parts except for, I think, one inner tie-rod end. Wipe the dirt off of the grease fittings before you grease them so you aren't pumping grit in there, and do it every 3000mi, and you will have a good time.
Well I had to go to Oriellys to get a new bearing on the fly, got it replaced, everything torqued to specs, drove it from Illinois down I-70 through Colorado and by the time I got to Grand Junction, the new bearing was already making noise.
Good thing it has a warranty.
Adrian_Thompson said:While I am a frequent defender of Chinese products, I believe there are a lot of low quality Chinese bearings out there. I was involved in potentially resourcing some bearings to China about 15 years ago. Every time we tested their bearings they failed in some way. Frequently various forms of the case hardening on the needles failing then galling the race. What was most concerning was the request that come back after many failures. 'Tell us the result you want and we'll give it to you' Not, let's build it to the specs, but we'll manufacture the results you are looking for and call it good.
NOTE I am not knocking Chinese products in general. Most of the crap that people complain about from China is crap because it's built down to the lowest possible price at the request of the customer and so you get what you pay for. I am sure that there are vendors in China that can build quality bearings of any type to any spec people are looking for. Just don't expect them to be pennies on the dollar, especially after freight costs. The Chinese can and do build anything and everything to the highest quality if people are willing to pay for it, but as a society we are more interested in 'more' than 'quality' Let's remember only three Nations have put people in space. In order they are Russia, the United States and China. Europe only managed it as a joint effort....end rant.
well put, and I've said the same thing over and over. Americans rate Chinese "quality" based on HF tools and Walmart toys. But China builds aircraft carriers and jet fighters and supersonic missiles and all kinds of other incredibly complex things, and they all work just as well as any other countries' similar items. But American buyers want to buy "cheap" Chinese stuff and then they're surprised that they get stuff that is spec'd to be inexpensive/cheap.....
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