Possible wheel bearing?

[dant]

I have just bought a 1993 k reg 440 xi with 109k on the clock for £99, it would cost that for a set of tyres for my other 440 so I took the risk, the car is pristine but there seems to be a noise coming from the front drivers side wheel its like a whining sound.

I jacked up the car and span the wheel and there seemed to be a juddering sound like d d d d d d. Is this the wheel bearing or something more serious?


Dan

i belive it is the bearing and unless you have a hub puller i would get somone else to do it. when i did one a few years ago i had to cut the bearing off with an angle grinder as it was on there nice and tight.

[dant]

I have now noticed the if you steer to the right the noise disappears.


Dan

PS how easy is a hub to change if I did not want to remove the bearing from the existing hub?

[AdamskiC70]

Hi the best way to test which one it is, is to jack each wheel up put your hand on the spring and spin the wheel if the wheel bearing has gone then you'll feel the roughness though the spring/skocker as you spin the wheel.
You will need a press to change the bearing or volvos tool for it.

Adam

Hi Dan, not being funny but if you only spent £99 on the whole car do you really want to bother spending some money to fix this fault? Whether wheel bearing, cv joint, driveshaft it is likely to just slowly get worse and more noisy and if you can't really feel any vibration then I'd just ignore it at least for now, you may find that some other problems crop up over the coming weeks and then you decide to cut your losses and dump the car as it was only a 100 quid. Wheras if you spend money fixing this fault you may then feel you've invested money in the car if something else crops up soon and then before you know it you've got a nice money pit going on!

Just my opinion...

Pete

Originally Posted by peteS40

Hi Dan, not being funny but if you only spent £99 on the whole car do you really want to bother spending some money to fix this fault? Whether wheel bearing, cv joint, driveshaft it is likely to just slowly get worse and more noisy and if you can't really feel any vibration then I'd just ignore it at least for now, you may find that some other problems crop up over the coming weeks and then you decide to cut your losses and dump the car as it was only a 100 quid. Wheras if you spend money fixing this fault you may then feel you've invested money in the car if something else crops up soon and then before you know it you've got a nice money pit going on!

Just my opinion...

Pete

thats a good point

[dant]

My thoughts exactly but it is quite noisy already, what is the worst that can happen? the wheel falls off? How long can I run it for?

I bought this car cheap because the garage selling it lost the keys and could not be bothered paying a mechanic, they did have it up for £499 at first, all I did was stick a new steering lock on it and a door handle and I was away, the wheel arches are better that my 1991 j reg.

Oh before you ask yes it did have all mots, v5 etc and a lot of service history.

Dan

Any of the possible things that are wrong with it, well certainly I would imagine it could get a lot nosier! I would start to worry when you get the vibration, certainly any of the possible things could cause quite a bit of vibration in time, felt through the whole car or the steering wheel.

I'm a bit like I'm guessing you are, which is that if there is anything wrong I want to get it sorted. But if you can tolerate the noise - and obviously it is not going to make the problem get better, it will just mean it is getting worse - then most probably you can run it for some time, at least until the MOT is needed. Alright, some people are going to come along and start talking about safety issues and obviously it is impossible for me to know just from reading what you put about what the problem is and how bad it is, but all I will say is that a lot of these sort of things can make so much noise they seem worse than they are.

I remember we used to have an old Fiesta and it needed a n/s/f wheel bearing for ages, you'd drive it and it would rumble like crazy and I swear it used to feel like the wheel was literally about to drop off. Of course it wasn't, and if you checked it for play it never really felt very bad at all. In time the job got done and then it was fine.

Another example was my old Renault, which one day suddenly started making a right racket from the diff which was just not worth fixing as integral to the tranmission - an auto! In those days my step-dad ran his garage out of a unit and he had ramps in there, we put it on one of those to check it out and you could quite clearly see the play in one driveshaft, by hand you could lever it back and forth. But you never felt it vibrate in the car, and my step-dad said he'd seen loads of old escorts get much worse than that. I still drove it around for about another 3 months until the MOT expired, but as there were about a million other things wrong with it as well I then scrapped it. Well, tell a lie, I actually shoved it in the garage for ages and declared it SORN and then finally took action and got round to scrapping it. That car was a money pit too, it didn't cost much to buy but things went wrong with it one after another and it got to the point where I had to keep fixing it because I'd put so much money into it, you see I know where it can go when it gets like this. In the end I ran it into the ground though... I think it did about 170,000 miles nearly in the end: I say "think", because the speedo stopped working at 137,800 odd (I used to get quite good at converting engine revs into mph to avoid getting done on gatsos!! - BTW it was an internal fault in the transmission so no point in trying to fix with e.g new speedo cable).

Pete

[bob13]

One prob with leaving a bearing rumble is heat the more worn out it gets the more heat is geneated. It can get to a point were the bearing welds itself together and into the housing which can wear out the drive shaft. Which makes it a lot harder to get out and more work and parts. I know with lorrys when they get really hot the grease catches fire thats why you see some lorry fires starting at their wheels but that is rare. Cant say i have heard of a car fire starting like that.