Bearings

TigerBlue

Gold forum user
Messages
827
Hey all,

I have recently gotten into the wheel hubs and dared to look at what I have been driving on.

Before I got started I ordered Bearing Seals for two Tigers and a set of wheel bearings for one car. My thought was to do Black Tiger and if I needed the Wheel Bearings? I would use them. As it turned out the bearings were fine in Black so I cleaned up and packed the old bearings with Redline syn grease and it is back on the road. I remembered/realized while doing that first job that I was not prepared for changing out the bearings because the inner races need to be knocked out. New inner races are "pressed" in and I could not do that.

Fortunately we have friends that can and will help. Darrell has done this before and had a hydraulic press. When I tore down TigerBlue it was clear that I would be installing the new bearings. The inner race outboard on the left side had chatter marks. On the right moisture inside the hub had produced a few rust flakes and etched a signature on the little outboard roller bearing. Photos below document the pressing part of the work.

D. used an aluminium drift punch to pound out the old races. There are notches cast in the hub to allow you to beat out the old race. A soft metal punch is prefered to avoid damage to the machined surfaces in the hub. Both of my hubs had dremal tool marks. Evidence that the bearing races had been whacked with a steel tool and then ground back (high points) with a rotary tool.

The "press" powered the new pieces in. D. had a variety of sizes of the things he stacked to drive the bearing races in. Note that when the hub was "studs down" he used spacers to make the studs stand off the fixed surface so that we did not move the studs which are also pressed in.

Later that weekend I put Blue back together with hand packed new bearings.

Rick
 

67tiger

Gold forum user
CAT Member
Messages
135
I just did my bearing races as well knocked them out and simply tapped the new race in with a hammer. It was very simple without a press and everything seems to work perfectly. I simply took the old race and ground down the outside diameter so it could be face to face with the new race all the way into the bore without jamming. There was no direct tapping on the new bearing race except to get it started from there it really went in quite easily and square. When you have limited tools you tend to engineer methods of madness that you hope will work, in this case it appears it did and without leaving the garage to get it done. I used the redline synthetic as well and plan on using it all the components of my rebuilt front end.
 
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