Maintaining Your Trailer’s Wheel Bearings

In the world of maintenance on your camper, a really important thing is to make sure that your wheel bearings are greased. And if you've ever actually greased a wheel bearing, you know what a pain this is. You kind of end up messy up to your elbows. It involves a lot, you take the tire off, you access the bearings, you repack the grease. There's a lot to it.

A lot easier on trailers to do something different and that is to install a product called a Bearing Buddy. And what's key to this, is that you're gonna see in a second, when this hub is off, there's an inside diameter here. I need to know that number. Because Bearing Buddies are available in different sizes, that's this diameter, we need this to match this. There are some common sizes out there, I'm not trying to overcomplicate this.

There are some common sizes you can match up but gotta make sure you get the right size for your trailer. So step one is this hub has to come off, this cap has to come off. We don't need to take the tire off. Typically if one. What a good catch.

If one puts a screwdriver behind that rim and taps. And don't try to pry it all off from one side, kinda work your way around. And once it's started, you can frequently then grab it and do that. We're done with that. We don't need it again.

This replaces it. Now we can look at this while this is off of here and get a feel for what's gonna happen. Once we put this on, there's a grease zerk here so I can put a grease gun on there and then by filling that through the zerk, that's what's gonna grease this. And then you can watch the status of this, the instructions are really good, in order to know, depending on where this fill level is, do I need to add more grease or not? So instead of ever pulling this off, taking off the castle nut, greasing all those bearings, all you do is fill this from the outside.

It's way easier to do. When you do this step, when you put the new one on, again, the directions are great, we wanna make sure that this is on there square. Don't let it get started cockeyed. And I don't wanna tap directly on this, I'm gonna put a piece of wood on there. Get it started.

You wanna be careful with this. If it starts going in there cockeyed, just stop, take it back off and start again 'cause if it gets real kittywampus and you just keep driving it, you're gonna distort something. I wanna make sure it's seated all the way around. Cool. Now next step, the greasing part is easy.

Gonna do that with a grease gun. One of the things I've done is, it's not uncommon, there are lots of different greases you can put in a grease gun. This one I specifically have wheel bearing grease in it and I only use it for what we're about to do, so the tube that's in here is wheel bearing grease, obviously, that's the best way to go. We wanna make sure we're using the right grease for what we're doing here. This'll just slip on the zerk, and then from here, as I pump this handle, it's filling that.

Just read the directions that come with the product and that's going to give you the indication of what to do, how to do it, how do I know when I'm done? In other words, what am I watching for here to make sure that I've got enough grease in there. I would say the big key to this is get this going straight onto the trailer, double check to make sure you're buying the right size, and then it is worth loading your gun with wheel bearing grease to make sure you're using the right product for what we're doing, and then just follow the instructions that come with it so you know when it's full, and then how to maintain it from there on out once you're driving the trailer down the road. These Bearing Buddies are so much of an easier way to make sure that you don't have a spindle failure on your trailer when you're out at a vacation someplace.