Rear Wheel Bearing Poll

[RWebb]

Were they bad when you removed them? If so, what was wrong; what did they look like or feel like?

and what mileage was on the car when you replaced them?

[DRACO A5OG]

mine were making the dreaded "clunk" on turns at stops. replaced and no more "clunk"s

driverside was good but passenger side was gritty.

I think adding a 1/4" spacer may have attributed to the failure. I did this beacause passenger side got pushed in from po accident or maybe damaged due to the tc, hard to tell, but all is good now corners great.

[KTL]

Mine are typically on their way to being bad. Grease presence typically minimal. Advisable to flush grease from new bearings and repack with QUALITY grease. Failure of these bearings isn't bearing shortcomings. It's cheap grease. Lots of racers have learned this over the years.

[CCM911]

I replace when I hear the dreaded "moan" that can be varied by turning the wheel back and forth.

[rusnak]

I replaced mine many many years ago. If you wait too long, then the stub axle (hub) gets friction welded onto the inner race, making that difficult. If you replace too soon, then the stub axle is harder to get out because the balls are tight in the races, and it's a biotch to pull the stub axle out past those fresh bearings.

Bottom line, be damn sure that the bearings are bad before you start to pull on that stub axle because once you start, you gotta finish it.

[E Sully]

Everthing looked good. The rear suspension bushings needed replacing, and at 40 years and 160,000 miles it It seemed like a good time to fis it up.

[ivangene]

One of mine also chewed up the hub

Cool!

Anyhow...all 4 done - 2 fronts, one side making noise/bad, 1 rear, noisy / bad, one year later the other rear....

[fastfredracing]

I just removed one from a 53,000 mile 930 that the inner bearing came apart in. It was making the most gawd awful screeching sound, that made me not even feel comfortable moving it the 30 yards from my parking lot into the garage.
Two of the rollers on the inner bearing somehow got turned sideways in their cages. The grease that was in there looked more like candle wax than grease, and I am guessing that is what caused the failure. The larger outer bearing looked perfect.

[Porsche84]

I've had problems a few times with my rear wheel bearings on my 911. The tires are wider than Porsche designed for and I use R compound tires. Both of these increase the load on the bearing. I also felt the the trailing arms (84 Carrera) were not designed as well as needed so I removed the e-brake and custom fit steel rings around the bearing housing. My bearing problems were significantly reduced but I did have failures on both rear bearing at a race track last year.

[zippy_gg]

No way of telling since you destroy the bearing when pulling the hubs off.
The car has 133k miles with a broken odo, and I was replacing all the suspension bushings so I decided to do the bearings as well.
I'd rather not wait for a failure...

[Scott R]

Picked my trailing arms up today from my mechanic (and met a fellow Pelican at the shop) My bearings sounded like they had sand in them when I dropped them off. The new ones are completely quiet and a bit harder to turn the worn ones. Not "hard" as in problematic, just as in they are tight without slop now.

Mileage is 124k on what I'm guessing to be the original bearings. I replaced with OEM since that was the shops choice.

[ben parrish]

Mine had a whirring noise at times...had obvious wear and and a "washboard" pattern on the race.

[Nickshu]

This is very tough to test because the Porsche procedure for removal results in destroying the when removing it.

Mine had no symptoms other than it was over 30 years old. But it did seem very dry inside when I got it apart, almost no grease present.

[martyk]

Replaced both rear wheel bearings on my '89 Carrera about a year ago @172,000 miles. The bearings were not noticably noisy. However, on hard acceleration onto an access ramp, experienced a rather severe oscilaton from what I belived was the left rear. Pulled over to check things out. There was nothing obvious. Cruised gently home. First focus was the left outer cv joint, then all cv joints, but nothing conclusive. The boots were good and the joints seemed to be well packed.

On reassembly, discovered serious play in the left bearing. At this mileage, replaced both bearings. Not surprisingly though, the ride is a noticably smoother and quieter.

[Scott Clarke]

Mine had significant play, which was pushing the brake pads into the caliper which led to mushy brakes. Not consistent with your poll choices, so I didn't vote.