Club 80-90 Forums

Rear wheel bearing replacement again

I had done this job before but did get stuck,
and had to take it to get the nut loosened.
I have an inch socket set and bar but too bendy.

It would be great to make up a useful tool for the future,
this might include a "wheel clamp" to bolt to the wheel studs.
Stopping the wheel from turning at all,
which might give the giant breaker bar something to bite against.

Anyhow, anyone care to show/tell of their innovations,
inspire me how to weld something up for the job.

At the moment my idea is to weld a slugging tool onto short scaff tube,
grind it off round so its like a giant socket.
Then weld that scaff socket 90' onto a scaff bar to make a giant brace.

I dont like the idea of hitting the slugging tool,
and besides my wheel studs are too long.
 

I found an electric impact gun did the job. Lots of Plusgas and cleaning the threads before hand around the castle nut. Just worked it back and forth a bit with the impact gun and it came off OK.
Other side I just used my breaker bar and socket and that came off. They can be a bugger though. I ended up trashing one off the syncro cuz it had pretty much welded itself to the stub axle threads with rust and crap.

I used a torque multiplier - I managed to pick up an old Norbar 5:1 model a couple of years back.

With a 46mm socket in the 1” output drive, and a long M25 bolt through the reaction arm into one of the holes in my wheel, I only need to input around 100Nm to get it undone, as it gives a 5:1 ratio. The best bit is that I can use the same torque wrench as I use for the wheel nuts to tighten it up again - 100Nm input = 500Nm output give or take a couple of percent.

Now that is very clever!

I haven't had to do this yet, but is it possible to loosen the nut whilst the wheels are still on the ground, then when loosened take wheel off, vaguely remember doing this on a 911 some time back.

TONYT25T25 wrote: ↑12 Jul 2022, 09:09 I haven't had to do this yet, but is it possible to loosen the nut whilst the wheels are still on the ground, then when loosened take wheel off, vaguely remember doing this on a 911 some time back.

Yes, if you're lucky.  I had to do mine a few weeks back after deciding to change the brake backplates.  Brakes were already in bits so without handbrake I was reliant on chocks to stop the wheel turning.  The offside came undone with a 3/4" socket, 500mm breaker bar and a very long (8 ft!) pole but even with that set up I couldn't stop the wheel spinning against the chocks on the nearside.  I also tried with the wheel off and a bit of angle iron bolted to two of the wheel studs and pressing against the ground.... bent the angle bar!

I had looked at torque multipliers, those Norbar ones look great but unless you get lucky are very pricy, almost bought a £40 new cheap one but in the end just carefully ground down the castle nut on one side as far as I dared, this weakened it enough to undo with the breaker bar.



 

I have a 1.5m long steel lollipop with 5 holes pitched out for the studs, made from some scrap bits. The disc is about ⅝" thick and the arm is 1½" x½" black steel. It spreads the load over all the studs and makes solo rear wheel flange or driveshaft work easy.