With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

four on the floor--finally

2008 February 02 23:13

I managed to put enough time to together today to get the last of the right side wheel bearings off my beetle today.

In addition to being busy and having difficulties, it's been fairly chilly, which makes working in the garage, particularly lying on the floor, not very fun.

I had to take the brake fluid line off of the right rear wheel cylinder to remove the brake plate. I had to use this 11mm open-end wrench this wierd angle because the brake line comes in between the bleeder bolt (nearer the camera) and the bolt that holds the cylinder on the brake plate (in the shadow of the wrench).

With the brake line off, I could remove the brake plate from the wheel housing, but not totally from the car. The parking break cable was still attached to the brake plate, so I just set it on the floor.

Here's the inside face of the suspension housing that holds the right rear stub axle. In the center, you can see the inner race of the ball bearing.

Around the outside of the hole is the grease seal. This must be removed to get the bearing out. The seals turned out to be much tougher to remove than I thought. They are rubber-colored on the outside, but there's a stiff metal pieces that makes it fit fairly tightly, which is part of its function. To remove it, you need to take a center punch and pound on it until it has deformed enough so that you can get a screwdriver in beside it:

This is the inner seal along with the center punch I used:

Here are both right rear wheel bearings. The ball bearing on the left is the inner bearing and the roller bearing on the right is the outer bearing.

Perhaps the markings on the left indicate that this bearing is original to the car?

An actual exploded diagram of all the stuff that came out of the bearing assembly in the car. To the left are things farther inside toward the transmission, and to the right is toward the outside. I placed items above one another that are inside and outside each other.

Here's the front bearing hardware that needs to be cleaned.

All the bearings and some of the hardware are soaking in mineral spirits to get the grease off of them for inspection. If I had to guess right now, I would say that most likely I can put those bearings back in, I don't need to change in any of my spares.