Packing ez lube bearings

Crabbypatty wrote:
The ez lube is a large dust cap that covers a zerc fitting. The fitting allows grease to to be pumped into the rear bearing through a hole in the shaft that exits in the rear. This TT is new to me but when I bought it, the prior owners used it as a park model and took off the axles. So even though it was 7 years old the tires axles brakes were brand new. Reading about ez lube I pumped in axle grease each of the past three years. I routinely check the tire and rim axle temps whenever I stop and they have been always cool to the touch, a good indicator. Im heading out for a long trip shortly and wanted to examine and repack my bearings. In discussing with my auto parts guy, my question was how much grease do I pump in after I repack?. He said what is the difference between your old trailer without them and the new trailer with them when you repack? I said truly nothing the bearings will be serviced properly. He said exactly its not necessary to pump in more grease just buy regular dust caps and forget about those fittings. When I pulled the wheels apart, I found three of the 4 grease seals compromised from to much grease and on two of the wheels, the magnets and interior drum surface were coated. I doubt if I had much brake if any at all on that side. I cleaned it all up which took a while getting all that grease out of the middle of the drum repacked and re assembled. I did ad 5 pumps per axle. So from now on I will just do what I have always done. Every spring as part of my wake up ritual, Im just going to repack the bearings and forget about those zerc fittings. I don't trust it enough to lose my brakes. What do you think?

1. My recommendation is to FORGET THOSE EZ LUBE fittings and simply treat them as normal bearings.

2. Unless you follow the "COMPLETE PROCEDURE" if using the EZ Lube feature your basically doing nothing more than rolling the die on compromising those grease seals and messing up your drum/brake pads. My investigation of those EZ Lube axles showed that it took about 1/3 to over 1/2 a tube of grease to totally fill that axle void and getting the EZ Lube feature to work properly. Even then it's a real hassle IMO to use that EZ Lube feature.

Larry