Catastrophic Bearing Failure

Stim wrote:
I worked on Semi's and trailers for over 30 years, supervised 3 shops in 2 states.
My guess is BOZO put spindle nuts on with impact!
Seen it too often in shops that I did not supervise!
I have run many service calls for burnt out wheel bearings.
I have had to cut off races welded to spindles and polish spindles for new bearings to fit many times.
Front wheel bearings usually give notice way before they are that bad.
I also had a R front seal let go on a 1993 KW that I was driving and when I hit the brakes it made a hard right turn into a Jersey Barrier! Luckily it just scuffed up the wheel studs.

The "normal" failure process for properly installed bearings begins most often with loss of lubrication. This leads to brinnelling of the rollers (somtimes the races too) which causes chips to break off the roller. These chips are often large enough to jam roller motion and the resulting sliding causes so much heat that stresses destroy the bearing. The difference between this type of failure and my situation is that this failure mode gives plenty of noisy warning. In a car this noise occurs over a period of time and is loud enough to alert the driver to get it fixed. If this failure mode occured on my coach, I would not have missed the noise, but there was no warning noise, nothing. It was instantaneous. By the time I knew there was a problem the damage was done.