Advised not to repack bearings???

[tragusa3]

Two years ago, and with our previous trailer, we had a miserable and expensive bearing failure while 4k miles from home. At the time, we had buddy bearings and were under the impression that they did the job. I have since been educated (expensively) that Buddy Bearings will not grease the inner bearings.

Fast forward to new and current trailer. We are taking a 6k mile trip this summer. Even though the trailer is one year and less than 2k miles old, we were willing to pay for a complete repacking. Yesterday, I went to the trailer shop where I met some very courteous and knowledgeable guys. The owner has had the trailer manufacturing business since the 70's.

They immediately said that my trailer has Dexter axles (the Mercedes of axles according to them) and they would just pump grease into the grease fitting. I was alarmed, as doing that had terrible consequences for me the last time. He pulled out a demo that he had and showed how the Dexter EZlube worked. It looked like it would logically work much better, but I want absolute assurance that our trip is going to go smooth this summer.

Question: Should I trust this improved way of greasing or still have the bearings repacked by hand? Of course I would have more piece of mind with the hand packing, but I would still prefer to save the $200 if I'm being silly.

Also, I picked up a complete bearing kit that I will grease and put in a ziplock as our spare. That alone will be more piece of mind.

Here's a video that shows what the mechanic explained to me.

Dexter EZ-Lube

[Huntindog]

The easy lube system may have another serious flaw.
Some years ago a member here on the forum (maybe jbarca?) posted why he felt so many had problems with grease getting past the seals. It seems that the grease hole had a sharp edge, that often damaged the seal when the drum slid over it during installation. His solution was to take a Dremel and chamfer that edge.
I have not taken mine apart yet to see if this is a problem... But I kinda doubt that the factory is chamfering this edge. When I do get around to it, I will chamfer this edge if needed.
Whether you use the easy lube feature or not, a seal that is damaged in this manner is not a good thing. Naturally if a seal is damaged, pumping grease into the hub would be a really, really, bad thing

[Likes_to_tow]

Itakethe5th2011 wrote:
I followed the direction on how to lube Dexter ezlube the first year I had my trailer. Took a lot of grease the first time I did it. Had tires off ground, turned wheel slowly while lubing hub with hand pump grease gun. It was real easy. The next year, as recommended by Dexter, I remove the drums to inspect the brakes. To my surprise, 3 of 4 wheels had grease leak past seal and on brake shoes. I had to get new shoes and clean the mess up. I called Dexter and the gentleman on the phone said the hubs were design for boat trailers, but the rv industry has jumped on them as a sale pitch. He still recommends packing by hand. I would never ever grease with gun again. Hand pack every year. Just feel much safer when I need to stop trailer.

My experiences exactly. Lots of truth spoken here!!! EZ lube hubs work great on a boat trailer that gets submerged but on a travel trailer they will fill your brake drums with grease and totally ruin your brake shoes!!! Been there done that!!!!

[MEXICOWANDERER]

Like a toilet dumping into a capped 4" sewer.
On the large side of the inner bearing a full lip seal rests. It seals against the spindle. Force grease THROUGH the bearing? Shirley You Jest...the process can replace grease in the space between bearings. While hoping the pressure build-up isn't great enough to compromise the rear seal. Whomever claims such a mechanism can rid even the outer bearing of all contaminants is either a dreamer or a con artist.

Ever do a wheel pack? I washed the bearings in clean solvent then air dried them without spinning them. Then I flushed the bearing with brake clean and felt GRIT on my hands from the flushed brake clean. Invariably.

When no more grit emerged, I would then pack the bearing in a cone wheel bearing packer.

Filling the center of the hub is about the stupidest idea I have ever heard of. grease does not move and if it does it will be by centrifugal force to the outside of the hub. If grease moves it is defective junk

The idea of filling the center of the hub came from hectorite clay based grease which bled (wicked) base oil through a trail of clay to the bearing. Thick don't mean squat...its the oil that does the work just as it does in oil filled Stemco diesel truck front axle and trailer bearings.

When clay based grease was finished wicking, it left modeling clay stiff residue which had to be knocked out of the hub cavity. Early Delco ball bearing grease was clay based, When packed correctly the bearings lasted much longer than prelubed sealed bearings.

That's history. Clay base greases are of the era of tar-top batteries.

Today's greases have to be inserted within the bearing AND STAY THERE. When the hub cover protected (sealed) the outer hub the rawhide seals the inner bearing.

A suitable grease REPELS water. It rejects it utterly and cannot meld with water ever. If water manages to penetrate the hub cap, it wont stay there for long and even if it does, it cannot get anywhere near metal. A good grease can have a half-pint of water in the hub, and it laughs it off. There's no foaming, no mixing, the water stays as a bubble forever kept away from metal. Usually it leaks out of the bearing hub through ten micron size metal irregularities.

Using suitable grease foreign matter cannot pass the hub cap. Never. Water finds it's way out but grit and dust is infinitely larger. So foreign contamination is what, 90,000 times less than it would be with a compromised hub seal?

New wave metal complex greases do not migrate. They do not wick base oil. If the grease is not present on and within the rollers and cage it never will be. You can place 10,000 tons of grease next to a bearings and it will contribute absolutely nothing.

So externally lubed bearings rely on grease displacement to attempt to purge contaminants out of the outer bearing? Contaminants that would not be there in the first place if the hub itself had a proper seal?

The only philosophy that makes sense here would be the engineers are convinced garbage grade grease will (inevitably) be used. Total snot that DOES homogenize with water, does form a muck and does lose a majority of its lubricity.

1940's and 50's thinking and technology that is now utterly and totally made obsolete when super greases are used.

Excellent grease and excellent sealing is light-years more secure than external lubing to purge grease. When not if water enters the hub and homogenizes with garbage grease how does the inner bearing fare..............hmmmmmmm?

When I was going to college, Shell Oil Co. bragged about their 4-Ball-wear-test which is an excellent test as is still being used. We went to school and learning how grease worked.

In 1978 when Lubrication Engineers revolutionized grease with it's Almagard and gear oil with Amasol, I stood amazed. Old conventions had to be tossed aside. Boat trailer manufacturers dare not seal their assemblies with closed hubs because sure as hell a knucklehead will use 39 cent grease. Externally greaseable RV hubs are exactly the same way. Sealing meant failure because too many owners are too cheap or too lazy to do-things-right and stick with garbage lubricants. Actually shops are to blame "Me? Spend five hundred dollars for a quarter-drum of grease when Snot-O-Rama has quarter drums for $79.95 ???"

Keep contaminants OUT OF bearings and use grease that stays put and reduces friction. Lest you think I am a shill for Lubrication Engineers, CHEVRON has a grease called RED GREASE which is a clone to Almagard.

There is JP-7, there is a blue goo, available from home dealer garages that is pure garbage even worse than parts-store grease. There are only two consumer available greases on the face of the earth that actually do what grease should do.

It's a free world. Do what you gotta do, but don't complain about it. The answer is in my response, but I wonder about the percentage of people who read this then sneer at it.

Meanwhile I'm done responding to grease issues. I did my job and said what I needed to say.

[Huntindog]

tragusa3 wrote:
I'm not following this logic? If fresh grease is entering from the rear of the hub and moving forward, then the old grease from the rear moves forward in front of it. When you start seeing clean grease out the front, it has displaced the rear and front bearings old grease. No?

I don't see the amount of grease used as a major drawback, as it was $10-12 of grease.

I had no intention of this thread turning into an argument. I appreciate all input and considered all of the information available to me. I made a choice to use the system. If it bites me, so be it. I'm a big boy and can live with it.

You have two bearings in a hub. The inner larger one,, and the puter smaller one. Between them is the hub cavity. It should be full of grease. But there have been many reports that the factory doesn't fill them at least not all the way. No matter as after the first grease gun pumping, they will be filled all the way.
The dirty grease that you see in the video exiting the spindle is from the smaller outer bearing. It is being pushed out by the clean grease in the hub cavity, which is being pushed by the dirty grease fom the larger inner bearing (this can vary by axle, but the inner bearing probably will hold about twice as much grease as the outer bearing) when you pump new gease into the zerk. In order to get the dirty grease out of the hub, you will need to keep pumping for quite q bit. And depending on just how full and evenly distributed the grease is in the hub cavity, (there may be some air voids in the hub) it may not come out in a ring like the video shows. In fact there can be some mixing of dirty/clean grease occuring as it makes it's way out... All of this pumping increases the likely hood of grease seeping past the seals and ending up on the brakes. No way to tell if this has happened. Also no way to tell if all of the dirty grease is out, or if some is hung up in a bearing.

You can see how this works can be seen by looking at the cutaway diagram that is used in the marketing.

[bandit86]

The front wheel bearings on my dodge 2500 4x4 are sealed bearings. They're known to go bad after 150,000 miles. Last year I pulled the abs sensor and added 3-4 ounces of semi-liquid grease. So far it's staying in.

When I was going for my class A license we were told never to add more grease than 40-50 percent of the bearing cavity, or else the grease have no way to move around and will overheat and fail, or let the bearing fail.

I'm with the group that says grease it properly every few years. Car and truck bearings last almost for ever, so first make sure your bearings are not cheap chinese bearings, grease them properly, then forget it other than regular check.

On a regular basis, when fueling, I go around and feel the hub for temperatures even of my pickup. This way I should stay ahead of any problems, like bearings needing grease and brakes sticking/ not working.

I would like some transparent bearing caps and a way to fill them with semi liquid grease. Then I can see if it got wet, or if the grease is discolored from heat

[tragusa3]

I'm not following this logic? If fresh grease is entering from the rear of the hub and moving forward, then the old grease from the rear moves forward in front of it. When you start seeing clean grease out the front, it has displaced the rear and front bearings old grease. No?

I don't see the amount of grease used as a major drawback, as it was $10-12 of grease.

I had no intention of this thread turning into an argument. I appreciate all input and considered all of the information available to me. I made a choice to use the system. If it bites me, so be it. I'm a big boy and can live with it.

[Huntindog]

fj12ryder wrote:
Done.

Ignoring the facts won't make them go away.
Think about how it works. Look at the diagrams.
The old grease from the inside bearing is STLL in there.
You can see this for yourself. Pump more grease into one hub afer the first dirty grease exits... Keep pumping and be sure to have a lot of grease on hand... More dirty grease will emerge after a lot of clean grease. It has a long ways to travel thru the hub and outer bearing, but it is there.

I wish it wasn't so, as I now have this system, and it would be really nice if it worked the way they market it... And it can if you pump a LOT of grease in to totally purge the old out... But it would take so much grease EVERYTIME as to make it not practical IMO. It is cheaper and easier to just do a manual packing job, and avoid the risk of grease on the brakes.

[fj12ryder]

Done.

[Huntindog]

tragusa3 wrote:
Two years ago, and with our previous trailer, we had a miserable and expensive bearing failure while 4k miles from home. At the time, we had buddy bearings and were under the impression that they did the job. I have since been educated (expensively) that Buddy Bearings will not grease the inner bearings.

Fast forward to new and current trailer. We are taking a 6k mile trip this summer. Even though the trailer is one year and less than 2k miles old, we were willing to pay for a complete repacking. Yesterday, I went to the trailer shop where I met some very courteous and knowledgeable guys. The owner has had the trailer manufacturing business since the 70's.

They immediately said that my trailer has Dexter axles (the Mercedes of axles according to them) and they would just pump grease into the grease fitting. I was alarmed, as doing that had terrible consequences for me the last time. He pulled out a demo that he had and showed how the Dexter EZlube worked. It looked like it would logically work much better, but I want absolute assurance that our trip is going to go smooth this summer.

Question: Should I trust this improved way of greasing or still have the bearings repacked by hand? Of course I would have more piece of mind with the hand packing, but I would still prefer to save the $200 if I'm being silly.

Also, I picked up a complete bearing kit that I will grease and put in a ziplock as our spare. That alone will be more piece of mind.

Here's a video that shows what the mechanic explained to me.

Dexter EZ-Lube

I just watched your video link.
It looks pretty slick... Too bad that what it shows is only half of the story. If you do this, you have only removed half of the old grease. Actually a little less than that. The old grease that you see exiting the hub is from the smaller outside bearing. The old grease from the larger inside bearing is still in there. If you want to get it out by pumping grease into the zerk, then you are gonna have to do a LOT of pumping and use a LOT of grease.

[Lynnmor]

fj12ryder wrote:
Well, the next time I plan to drive under the ocean and stay there for 10 years I'll sure keep that stuff in mind. In the meantime, I'll just continue to shake my head and think "Geeze louise, some people just can't help who they are."

For you to continue with advice that is against the manufacturers recommendation and against all common sense is irresponsible. There are a few folks that are new to trailering, and should be guided properly, not have them exposed to safety issues and unnecessary repairs.

[fj12ryder]

Done.

[MEXICOWANDERER]

http://products.lelubricants.com/viewitems/industrial-greases-for-agriculture/almagard-vari-purpose-...

[MEXICOWANDERER]

Laziness...

Let's do barbecued chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and gravy.

"You nuts? That's waaaaaaay too much work. I take this here microwave dinner - I sticks it in - slams the door and pushes a button".

Paint a house for $399 dollars worth of paint every 4 years or paint a house for a thousand dollars worth of paint that lasts ten years?

Ignore Hwang Ho® bearings because dealing with them "Is going to be a hassle", and schmucking off finding a truly superior grade of grease, because getting ahold of really good grease "is surely going to be a hassle".

Water PROOF grease that can withstand 10 years under seawater when applied to USA manufacturer grade bearings means I will be smirking when the naysayers are broken down on the shoulder of an interstate. I never have and I never will use zerk fitting lubrication on a sea launch boat trailer because the bearings are totally sealed with Almagard 3752, and 15 years down the road, the money for EZ lube and Dexter nonsense is still in my pocket. And I have no worries at all about accidentally greasing the brake shoes. But we wouldn't want to put Dexter or EZ lube out of business, would we? Grease does not magically de-materialize. So tell me. where does the grease go, pumping after pumping after pumping? How do you know FOR SURE you haven't compromised the rear seal?

[fj12ryder]

Done.