I'm going to take this slow and I am going to add a spoon full of sugar to my comments before I go and make a bunch of enemy's here.
I would recommend that every time you rotate your tires and every time you change your motor oil that you jack your truck up under the bottom of the ball joint and you put one hand at the top of the wheel and another at the bottom of the wheel and shake the wheel up and down and side to side.
That will tell you if something is loose or not. You can check both ball joints and the tie rod ends easily by just doing what I just mentioned.
The wheel bearing will only shake about 1/8th of an inch when it is worn out.
If someone ran a wheel bearing until it fell apart, that person was just plain stupid and shouldn't even have a driver’s license.
I fight with my dad all the time. My dad was born back in '36 and his favorite car was a 1955 Chevy Bel Air. He still has parts for them out in the garage.
There are no points, plugs and condenser. You wonder why I bring this all up; the reason is because the 1955 Chevrolet was the first Chevrolet to have a ball joint suspension. Everything before that was king pins and bushings.
Now my dad - he understands all that stuff as do I because my first car was a 1973 Bel Air and my second car was a 1977 Monte Carlo. I still have parts of my first car out in the field behind my mom's house as I also have my first truck - a 1967 Sedan Delivery truck. All we ever bought was Chevrolets and if my grandfather came back from the grave driving a Ford, we would have a hard time believing it.
With the older style vehicles, you had a dust cap and you could physically take the cap off and take the jam nut off and grease the bearings. But they have not made a car that you could do that with since 1988 when they discontinued the Monte Carlo. That is 22 years already.
The wheel bearing is a one piece unit. You take the old one out and you put the new one in. There are no user serviceable parts. If you beat it with a hammer or you run it till it falls apart, it will fall apart. But again, that is only if you are too stupid and ignore the warning signs. It isn't like as if you could be driving down the road and the wheel would just fall off or something.
It is a long and drawn out process where your gas mileage will get worse and your vehicle might pull to one side of the road or wander. You will hear noises come out of the hub and you will pretty much know when it is happening.
The problem is - once it goes, there is no way to grease it and resurrect it once it goes bad. You might actually get used to hearing that noise every time you drive it and in time you might actually just ignore the noise until it is too late.
It is mechanically impossible for the wheel to just fall off. The brake caliper mount encompasses the brake rotor on the top and the spindle and brakes will hold the wheel on - at least long enough for you to get it off the road and towed to a garage if it got that bad.
You couldn't say that you didn't know that it was going bad or that it went and you didn't know it. The reluctor wheel for the anti lock brakes is built inside of the spindle and when the bearings goes, it takes out the wheel sensor and the ABS light will come on in the dash and the brakes will act weird. They might lock up when you are going under 15 mph for no apparently good reason.
Truthfully, I never had a problem with wheel bearings until GM came out with their recall where they offered to clean the wheel sensor for free. They took the wheel sensor out - which the rust did move it away from the bore where it was located. Only when the mechanic used a flat file to clean the top of the hole - he got rust down into the bearing and it went bad within two weeks. That was on the drivers side of my brothers 02' Avalanche.
So there I was all fat, dumb and happy and I bought two new wheel bearings, because I figured that if the one was bad that the other was probably right behind it. Only the next year when I went for State Inspection in Pennsylvania, the truck failed inspection because the wheel bearing was faulty again.
Now if the original one went bad in 85,000 miles, and I cleaned everything and did everything just as good as or even better then what it was done at the factory and bought a good bearing and it went bad in less then 15,000 miles. Then the problem is not in the bearing as much as it is in the design.
There has to be something that is causing it to go bad.
As the story goes, the first time I changed mine, I knocked a hole in the CV boot and had to replace it. The second time I had to replace it - I was a little more careful and the third time when I had to replace the new rotor, I knocked a hole in the CV boot again.
I had the axles out so many times that I can do it in my sleep.
My advice, since the differential leaked from the day it was new is - if the mechanic is going to do any work, he / she needs to mark where the axle was at when they took it off and put it back on at the same identical holes as where it came off. Maybe it does something to the bearing when you put the axle back on - in a different place.
The only other thing I will say is that the original wheel bearing that I took off the passenger side still looks and works like a new one. But there is a neoprene seal on the back side - which goes bad and lets rust and water in the bearing - which I suspect knocks the bearing out.
When I replace the wheel bearing, I put a coating of RVT on the back side of the bearing all around the flange on the front side of the stub axle and I put a coating of RVT in the bore of the spindle. I believe that it keeps the spindle from rusting and lets the bearing come out easier when it goes bad the next time.
Because I worked in a machine shop and I understand how bearings works, and because anything that puts unequal pressure on the bearings - including the rust in the bore of the spindle. I believe that they just knock themselves out because as the bore rusts it gets smaller and the bearings have more pressure put against it. The cones and rollers wears themselves out as particles of chrome falls of them - due to a lack of lubrication, caused by the deterioration of the seal on the back side of the bearings.
The new bearings don't even have a dust cover over the spindle nut.
I make sure to put a liberal coating of RVT on the front side under the jam nut and on top of the flat washer.
All you can do is take the old one out and throw it away and replace it with a better one - that you would hope would last as long as or longer than the original.
