Postby Hasbeen » 08 Sep 2015 17:12
I have always found wheel or axle bearings, tapered or roller, give a fully audible warning well before they fail. Of course you have to be listening to your car to hear it. A little story about wheel bearings.
My son recently had a problem with the front wheel bearings on his Ford Ranger 4WD crew cab ute, one vehicle that still has them. He is one of these funny people who go looking for impossible tracks & small rivers to drive through, to prove they can do it.
One side developed a rumble which was not improved by adjusting. As he was still playing sailor boy in the navy he was getting it serviced by the Ford dealer. A service requirement on the Ranger is to clean & repack the front wheel bearings every 20,000 or 40,000 kilometres, so he mentioned the bearings were getting noisy when he put it in for a service which included a bearing regrease.
They were still rumbling after the service, & was told "they all do that sir" in that condescending tone some service advisers use. He made the time to check them that night & found not only had they not been greased as required & charged for in his service, they were actually rusty. That will teach him to go driving through deep water.
Being of an argumentative nature, he took some photo's of his rusty, & not repacked wheel bearings & emailed them to the Ford dealer, & to Ford Australia, along with a copy his service receipt.
Ford were quite upset at their dealer being caught not doing the work required in their service schedule, & made the dealer replace all his wheel bearings free of charge.
I wonder if that dealer now does the work they charge for, & if they now have a mechanic who can recognise the sound of a failing wheel bearing. Perhaps they should have bothered to find out they were dealing with a marine engineer, rather than a seaman, & then listened to his request.
Hasbeen
