notenuftime
Full Access Member
Any thing I need to know about replace inner and outer bearings. Doing the fronts got 4wd Dana 50. Any info is good things I may need or tricks.
I just torn apart three of these and reassembled one. Two had spindle nuts with four tabs and one had five tabs. "Only Ford"! Think nuts get torqued to 50lbs then backoff no more than 1/4 turn.....It's not hard, really... But I'd not worry about replacing them unless they actually need it.
You will need the special "ford 4x4 hub socket"; it's got 4 tabs to remove the nuts in there.
As far as I can tell, these bearings are /really/ heavy duty, and I've taken multiple apart, found them in perfectly good shape. Clean it, pack a bunch of new grease in it and call it good!
Just make sure to get the preload somewhere near what it should be when you reassemble it.
If you don't have the proper torque wrench for measuring how many inch pounds it takes to rotate the hub, you can kind of guess:
In my experience, it's basically just snug it up and give it a little more. Keep tightening down until you feel the hub getting harder to turn, then back it off a little. I just go until it's as tight as possible without dragging.
Never had an issue doing that!
Note: if you start driving it, and find that it's heating up(and it's not the brakes), you might want to loosen it a hair....
+1 on that. I just finished rebuilding that part of the axle on mine. At least three needle bearings were out of the cage and ground flat. Didn't fix the problem I'm having much to my surprise but that's a different threadSince you have the hub off pull the spindle and check the needle bearing and seal inside the spindle.