the Walnut Diary

One evening last week I spent 2 ½ hours on a simple bearing replacement on my trailer.  Blame it on middle-aged ineptitude or bad lighting, for it wasn’t for a lack of tools, parts, or place to work.  I just couldn’t get the thing to fit back together.

To my credit I must protest that I did spot the bad wheel and attempt to repair it before heading out onto the highway and endangering others.  I have learned something in the aftermath of last summer’s loose-bolt debacle.

The clinical definition of insanity is repeatedly to try the same thing in the expectation of different results.  Friday I must have gone a little crazy, because I kept thinking that if I could just get that big nut to catch on those threads, I could force the thing into place with the ¾” ratchet.

The fog of war has nothing on the confusion surrounding a dark trailer hub full of black grease, miscellaneous metal parts, and bits of gray limestone from each time I dropped it on the driveway.

Number one rule:  don’t take a trailer bearing apart on a fresh gravel driveway, especially when there’s a nice clean garage floor twenty feet away.  Grease is a gravel-magnet, and when things get sticky, my mind seems to seize up.

A question emerged when I looked up the broken bearing in the Princess Auto Catalog.  It listed 1 inch and 1 1/16” splines for 2000 lb trailer axles.  Mine measured  1 1/32”.  Uh?  Maybe they under-or over-estimate sizes, like the nominal measurements at lumber yards.

When I arrived at the store the following afternoon, bearings for 1 1/16” splines were not in evidence at all, but the 1.03125” size was available.  That worked out to 1 1/32, so I bought a set of bearings, washers, nuts and seals for this size, but hedged my bets with the 1” size, as well.  There are lots of other trailers at the farm which will need a set of bearings, I’m sure.

The new parts matched the old ones, so I was away to the races once the rain stopped.  Removing the remains of the broken inside bearing the previous night had required the sacrifice of a small screwdriver, the services of a larger one and a 3 lb sledge, and finally a bearing puller once I had come to my senses.  Add another hour to the time for the project, come to think of it.

On went the vinyl gloves.  I tentatively wiped the black goo out of the hub, somewhat taken aback by all of the chunks of rock in there until I realized they were roller bearings which had been chewed up after their holder had disintegrated.

First I needed to seat the back bearing.  I carefully checked the spline.  It would fit fine.  So I tapped the tapered holder into place on the back of the hub.  It wouldn’t go far enough.  Tap harder, with a piece of oak cut to fit on the amazingly dull band saw.  I guess that alternator body Charlie was cutting up was made of something other than aluminum.

No luck.  I measured the diameter of the race, then headed for the other garage and my ¾” sockets.  Surely enough, a 1 7/16” socket fits the space nicely.  Taps didn’t work.  Harder taps started to crack the hub, so I decided that was far enough.

I emptied the grease gun into the cavity, then slipped it onto the spline.  In went the front bearing, almost far enough.   The bolt, even without a washer, just wouldn’t reach.  Much insane wiggling, tapping with the sledge, imprecations to the twin deities of grease and gravel, came to naught.

When in doubt, remove the wheel and look.  Off it came, with insolent ease, on the garage floor.  The now-lighter hub still wouldn’t fit.  Tried to measure.  My expensive electronic measuring thing wasn’t going into that greasy hub.  A piece of oak went in.  Should work.

After an amazingly long time I realized that while I had put a tapered bearing sleeve into the hub part, I hadn’t previously removed the one that was in it.  Inspection revealed that the poor fit was caused by two of the tapered sleeves jammed together in the back of the hub.  A tap with a screwdriver and the extra race dropped out and rang triumphantly on the concrete floor.

From there it went together without difficulty.

What have I learned?  In a bad wheel, even when some parts have disintegrated, the round, flat ones likely haven’t, and if you try to put an extra round flat thing into a hub without taking the other one out, the bearings won’t fit, no matter how much you tap them with a sledge hammer or ask them nicely.

If I hadn’t written this down I would have forgotten about my stupidity already.  Amazing how the human mind heals the ego.