Truck Work

[today’s run: 3.5 miles]

We had a nice three-day weekend and I really enjoyed it.

One of my accomplishments was to work on my truck a little bit.  It is a ’93 Ford F-150 that I have had about 6 months.

It has been making noise in the front end since I got it.  It doesn’t pull left or right, just seems more noisy than it should be.

This weekend I tore into the wheel bearings on both sides.  The disk brake goes over the spindle.  Inside the disk there are two wheel bearings, an inside and an outside.

One the driver’s side of the vehicle things looked pretty good.  On the passenger side I noticed some rust on the spindle nut and the grease on the bearings was kind of skimpy and funny looking.  Also there was some surface rust on the inside of the disk tube (I’m not sure what to call that part) between where the bearings are.  It looked to me like there had been some moisture inside the spindle-bearing-disk assembly.  When I looked at the outer wheel bearing it had a funny brown color; new ones are nice and shiny, this one wasn’t.

So I bought inner and outer bearings and an inner seal for both sides and changed them all out.  That really helped.  It is much quieter now in the front end.  It feels happier when I drive it.

I used some solvent to clean up that outer bearing, and the brown coloring was from some surface rust on the bearings themselves.  Not good.  I think it either stood in water at one time, or the skimpy greasing let moisture in.  I greased things up to the max when I put it back together with the new parts.

I also changed the heavy gear oil in the rear differential.  That was not leaking or making noise, but it may never have been done and the truck has 150k on it.  So I did that.