Add grease zerk to axle or not?

brulaz wrote:

JJBIRISH wrote:

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Another thing to remember, there are many axles that go un-serviced for a very long time and never have a bearing failure… many autos reach the junkyard with OE bearings still in them, never serviced
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Yes, but all modern autos use sealed bearings that you never have to service. They exist for trailers, I see Dexter makes axles with sealed bearings, but I've never seen a trailer using them.

Another pet peeve of mine, along with the general lack of self-adjusting brakes. Our trailers are just dinosaurs.

Yes the modern autos are using double sealed bearings or sealed bearing cartridges, but I am referring to the standard old bearing sets, where the only time they were serviced is when they went bad often after many years… once the removable disk brake rotor was incorporated and the hub no longer was pulled to do a brake job, many if not most of these went from new to graveyard without a bearing failure or bearing service…
the same with the rear bearings, many went from new to graveyard without so much as a rear end oil change…
I am not sure the new never lube used In autos will work as well… I already know of to many that were noisy and had to be replaced…

I have extensively used (permanently sealed) double sealed bearings as replacements to the standard bearings in my off road cross country race bikes… they worked great for running in extreme wet and muddy conditions…

As much as I like the never lube bearings, I don’t care for the cartridge type used in RV axles… I believe the bearings sit to close and don’t hold up well enough to the side load stress placed on them…