Nev-r-lube axles on my Alpenlite

Some great advice. Thank you all for your input!

Guess I may not be thinking of same type of bearings. I had a 2001 Alpenlite 5ver, 2 large goose neck stock trailers, and a large BP tandem axle dump trailer. They had zirk fittings. not pemanently packed.

EZ Lube and Never Lube are not the same bearings. EZ lube has the zerk fitting that puts a lot of grease in a hole through the axle and into the inner bearings. For the time and how easy and inexpensive it is to buy a seal and some grease I think it is just as easy to repack and check the brakes at the same time by taking it apart and making sure all is well, not just pushing more grease into the zerk and hoping all is well. And Dexter recommends an annual take it apart inspection for the EZ Lube bearings.

Guess I may not be thinking of same type of bearings. I had a 2001 Alpenlite 5ver, 2 large goose neck stock trailers, and a large BP tandem axle dump trailer. They had zirk fittings. not pemanently packed.

After 8 years I replaced my never-lube bearings, as a precaution. These bearings require a press to remove/replace and I was not willing to chance failure alongside of highway.
As mentioned previously, bearing failure can cause other damage, friend had to replace axle, after factory special order of replacement (OR resident wound up leaving 5er in UT for weeks).

According to Dexter my nev-r-lube bearings were good for 100.000 miles or 5 years but with around 30.000 miles and 5 years one failed totalling everything from the spindle out ($3.000 worth of damage) and Dexter through it total incompetence in shipping stranded us in Griffin GA. for 6 days waiting for parts and we'd probably still be there had I not raised hell with them on the phone!! The mechanic who did the repair said the other three were fine but as soon as I got home I replaced the other three bearings and will replace them again in four more years as I have zero faith in them. Frau Blücher and I only travel from Ontario to Florida twice year which is way more than you BUT,,,,as Murphy's law dictates "If anything can go wrong, it will" and I don't know what it's like on the stretch of road that takes you to and from your campground but I'll never be stuck on the side of I-75 outside if Atlanta with trucks doing 75+MPH three feet from my port side due to those bearings again! Replacing them is relatively simple, you can buy them direct from Dexter and my mechanic where I live came out to my rig and replaced them on site for $150 and a couple of cold beers, very cheap insurance as I see it.

I would not worry about it for three miles to the camp. You are close to help in any case. If you strike out on a long trip I would get them checked as well as tires.

Lol at 12 mi a year I'd check um in another 5 yrs :)

we had a failure of a sealed bearing (LCI) earlier this year which caused the wheel to cock on the axle & the tire to scrap on the shock mount. When we got stopped we found the hub cavity on fire also... fun day. I did the periodic recommended checks per the manufacturers bulletin & all seemed well. The only other thing I can think of to do is to use an infrared gun to check hub temperatures whenever you stop to see if there's one or more bearings with high temperatures.
There have been others that have experienced failures of these never-lube type bearings. From what i understand the seals fail causing loss of lubrication. The ones on my axles were non-serviceable so you had to replace the entire cartridge. A couple of years after our trailer was made LCI stopped using the ones we had so not sure if parts would be available or not. One other item, in our case the axles were made for these bearing cartridges and you could simply remove the cartridge and replace it with standard wheel bearings.
We had about 15000-20000 miles on our trailer when we had the bearing failure.

I asked the same question on 10/19/2013.

After I got the responses (and most of them were replies that it is a lifetime warrant), I had the trailer in for service and asked them to check it out. After 10 years, they said the Nev-r-lube axles were fine. As the responses said to do, I spin the tires and listen and feel for anything that is worrisome.

Not unless there is a defect. I have well over 80,000 towing miles on my old fashioned (take em off and lube em every five years or so) bearings and never had a problem.