Grease Cap, 2.44" OD Drive In with Plug

Video Transcript for Packing Trailer Bearing Demonstration

Do not put off checking and repacking your bearings as it will save you a lot of trouble down the road. It may be messy but is well worth it, time well spent. Joe spells it out for you step by step making it all very easy.

Now that we have everything cleaned up and all of the old grease out of the way what we are going to do is basically is go ahead and get the bearings reinstalled. What we want to do first is put a layer of grease on the bearing surface to help keep down the resistance of the initial rolling so we will just put a finger full on there and then do the same thing for the inner bearing also, take a finger full and just wipe it around the outside edge a little bit. Again, the grease is going to come out on top of this here between the seal it is going to pack itself fill all this up and go right back through the bearing. So now that we have got that initially lubed up we will go ahead and put the seal back on and we will just tap that back into place. The thing about the seals it that you do not want to drive them into the bearing at all you want to get them actually flush with the outside edge here that way you have plenty of movement for this to seal on top of the spindle itself because sometimes they sit farther back than others. The same thing for the front, just do a finger full to cover it in grease, same thing for the bearing.

At this point we will go ahead and reinstall it on the spindle. Now we will go ahead and just put our spindle nut back on which holds everything together so when we put the grease in the air that is trapped inside it right now will have an easier time getting back out than having the washer and stuff on top of it. We will just install our grease gun here and fill it full of grease. At this point we will go ahead and take off our nut, put our washers back on and reassemble it. Our adjustment on our nut here, what you want to do is just run it until it just stops and then you snug it just a little bit and then spin your hub. One this will get that grease running around the bearings and two you might just loosen it up a little bit more like that. And then what you want to check for is any movement left to right and also up and down. On certain spindles I should say if you run it all the way up and it stops and does not go any more, it naturally just stops on its own because it ran out of threads or whatnot. If you have a little bit of movement that is ok because it is better to have it just a hair on the loose side than it is to have it too tight which would actually put the bearings in a bind and heat up faster. What I like to do is do that just a few times, get a feel for it and then back it off just a hair and then go ahead and put our cage back onto it and it should be fine. Within this cage the nut will probably have to float back and forth to find its own tension. There is just barely some movement which is just fine. And also when you put your whole wheel assembly on you can check it that way too because one you get a little more leverage and two you can actually measure easier. You should not have any more than probably an eighth to a quarter of an inch movement on the outside, that would be on the outside of the wheel itself.

The last thing we need to do is install our grease cap. We are going to switch out to a new one because if you have to beat it up to take it off chances are it is going to be out of round to begin with. What you can do is simply get it on straight and tap it on. Some hubs are easier to do than others. If you actually have a brand new hub and you are reassembling it what you can do is go out and get yourself an union for two inch metal conduit and use this union, this will actually fit perfectly this dust cap here for 3,500 lb axles. You can use this which is a lot easier, you can just beat it on straight and you do not have to worry about messing up the cap itself. When we put it on we have a little air trapped in there so we can just vent it a little bit and this will sit just like that and you have one hub repacked.