Wheel bearings again

The E-Z lube bearings are fine but Dexter does a CYA in their bearing manual where they recommend 12K miles or 12 months. Conservative as far as the time factor, miles - well if you are 'elderly' like me, you then can recall doing bearing maintenance on your rear drive car. Same thing that Dexter recommends. We generally put 7-8000 miles a year on our 5er. So with that in mind, I do ours every spring. I've also pulled those no-name bearings supplied by Dexter and replaced them with US made Timkens. Those 8 bearings and four 10-36 seals were about $125 for a 6000 pound axle with 5200 and lighter axles a bit less. Now, that story about blowing seals - you wont if you use a hand pump grease gun and rotate the tie/wheel/hub assembly while pumping lube in. The biggest downfall with this system is when you repack. It takes at least 200 pumps and almost a full tube of grease to fill that pretty large hub.

Someone mentioned Nevr Lube hubs - the 50mm capsules (7000 pound axles) are seldom a problem. It's the 42mm assembly (5200/6000 pound axles) that tend to be a problem, failing, occasionally catastrophically in West Overshoe on a Saturday night. Luckily, Dexter has for the most part moved on from these but still supply axles to OEMs with questionable tapered roller bearings