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

It sounds like an interesting experiment. Repacking the bearings as frequently as every two years or so is probably overkill for most applications, but a failure can be a real catastrophe. Repacking is as much for inspection as lubrication. I found a couple of my outer bearings with some rough places the first time I repacked. They were probably not near failure, but it was cheap to replace them with new ones.

If you pump too much grease, you might blow the seals. I think it would be better to clean/repack if you want to start over and make sure the grease is good.

Thanks for all the responses, I figure we have not put that high a mileage on it, but i too feel one should at least check the bearings visually once in a awhile, I always did my own cars and so will do the trailer, but did think it would be interesting to do one wheel and see when i take it apart how well the grease got distributed.

I am just a nut about doing my bearings every two years whether they need it or not

Our 5th wheel came with Dexter NeveRlube wheel bearings. We have put 60,000 miles on it with no problems.

One thing you always want to do when greasing with the EZ lube caps is, jack up the wheel and grease and rotate at the same time. That gets the grease evenly distributed better.

I have always felt the E Z Lube system was most beneficial to boat trailers and the like. If you are going to roll your wheels into water, filling any cavities with grease prevents water penetration around the wheel bearings. I can see some advantage to using it on road trailers but if it gives you a false since of the quality of your wheel bearing grease it could do more harm than help.

The EZ-lube system is really just for refreshing the hub with some new stuff. A feel good check you have some decent stuff in the hub.

Do not believe anyone who says the EZ-lube system blows seals. That is absolutely false, unless the seal is indeed bad. Only a bad seal will allow grease to pass!

But do remove and manually repack the bearings by pulling the hubs every 12k miles as directed, do not rely on the EZ-lube system.

Ironically, if you do manually repack the bearings every 12k miles or less, you really have no need to use the EZ-lube system.

It's really not that interesting, you just end up with a lot of extra grease to clean off from inside the hub.

After two years, I opened my hubs up, cleaned everything and replaced the bearings just for the heck of it - didn't see anything wrong with them but it's like a $5 part so why not.

I only have a single axle trailer, so a double or triple 5R I can see it being a lot more work - ez lube might win out there.