![]() ![]() This is sometimes also caused by a damaged CV joint, but can also be due to worn wheel bearings if you hear a clicking noise when turning. Here are a few other sounds and symptoms of bad wheel hub bearings: If it doesn’t, you may have a bad wheel bearing. If it does, you probably have unevenly worn tires. We recommend starting by rotating your tires to see if the noise changes. Often times it can be easier to rule out other problems with your car that can cause noise to help prove you really do have a bad wheel bearing. Similarly, there are a lot of other noises your suspension can make that make it hard to tell what’s really going on down by your wheels. Since a failed bearing sounds a lot like excessive road noise, it can be hard to do a wheel bearing noise diagnosis to tell if you’ve simply got worn tires or a bad wheel bearing. What Does Bad Wheel Bearing Noise Sound Like?ĭetermining if you’ve got a failed wheel bearing in your car can often be a difficult task. Since so much weight is riding on your wheel bearings, and so much load is put on them in corners, even the smallest amount of surface damage to your bearing can cause a lot of noise like a growling or humming or in some cases a grinding noise. These microscopic pieces of metal, as well as any contamination that gets into the bearing, will wear away at the highly polished surfaces causing pitting and deformation. Over time the bearing will wear slightly, allowing microscopic pieces of metal into the grease. Both the surface of the rollers and the race are precision machined to tight tolerances and highly polished to allow the rollers to pass easily over the race with the addition of bearing grease for lubrication and cooling. A wheel bearing will usually fail due to pitting or small damage on the surface of the rollers or the bearing race. No matter what type of bearing you have, bad wheel bearing symptoms are the same. How do You Know if You Have a Bad Wheel Bearing? ![]() The downside is that the bearings cannot be serviced, cleaned or re-greased to once they are worn out the whole bearing must be discarded and a new bearing assembly installed. The benefit is that it’s very difficult for contamination to get into the bearing to cause accelerated wear. ![]() These unit bearings are sealed units that cannot be serviced. Today, most vehicles use a unit bearing pressed or bolted onto the hub or knuckle. On classic cars, wheel bearings were a set of tapered roller bearings on a non-drive wheel or a straight bearing supporting an axle of the drive wheel. It’s important to regularly check your transmission fluid level find out if you have a leak in your transmission so you can get the problem fixed before any damage occurs. A similar noise can come from worn bearings in your transmission or even a low transmission fluid level. A bad wheel bearing sound is usually a loud hum coming from that wheel sort of like loud road noise from bad tires. Wheel bearing wear and tear can happen for a variety of reasons we’ll look at in a minute. Since a wheel bearing has to accomplish all this for hundreds of thousands of miles, it’s not surprising that they wear out occasionally. ![]() What Happens When a Wheel Bearing Goes Out? Bearings are used in all sorts of things we use every day so you might be interested to learn about more uses for bearings ! Unlike your engine bearings, your wheel bearings don’t have a constant supply of oil lubricating and cooling them, they have to be self-sufficient and also be sealed tight enough to keep road dust and water out of them. Not only does a wheel bearing have to support the entire weight of your vehicle while it is traveling over rough roads, potholes and maybe the occasional curb, they also have to take the lateral forces of corners you take and have to do all that while allowing your wheel to spin at thousands of revolutions per minute. The hub holds the lug bolts that you use to bolt the tire onto the wheel. Wheel bearings ride on a metal axle shaft and fits tightly inside the hub, a hollow piece of metal at the center of the wheel. But first thing’s first, what is a wheel bearing? A wheel bearing is a set of small steel balls which are held together in a metal ring called a race and help a wheel spin by reducing friction. The wheel bearings in your car take a lot of abuse and, not surprisingly, why we get a lot of questions about wheel bearing noise and signs of bad bearings. ![]()
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