How to Change a Front Wheel Bearing on a 4th Gen

[Vtecmec]

I managed to swap out my own front wheel bearings on the lude, and this is how I did it…….

Honda very kindly have decided to discontinue wheel bearings for the 4th gen, so I picked up these as a replacement.



Remove the front knuckle from the car and remove the little metal sealing ring, you can see this in the last photo at the bottom.

Then take a socket (I used a 24mm) and 2 hammers, place the socket on the back side of the hub and place one hammer on the socket and then smack this with the other hammer, the hub should pop out fairly easily.



This will destroy the bearing but your swapping it out anyway.

This will leave you with something like this…..



Now you can see half the inner race of the bearing is still stuck to the hub, get a grinder and cut a little slot into the race, then hit it with a hammer and chisel, this will split the race and you should be able to slip it off the hub.



Now you need to remove the outer part of the bearing from the knuckle, this is held in place with a circlip and is pressed in, remove the circlip (shown in a pic below) and then remove the rest of the inner race from the bearing.

Once you have done this you can take one of your hammers, place it on the shelf that lies within the middle of the bearing and smack it with your other hammer, keep doing this and eventually you will push out the rest of the bearing from the hub. Sorry no pics of this but it is fairly obvious.

Fitting the new bearing with hammer blows is probably not a good idea, so I used threaded bars to pull the bearing back into the hub.

I utilised stuff I had in the shed, which included some suspension spring compressors and a hub puller.

Here is my setup for pressing the bearing back into the knuckle (new bearing halfway in here).



It consists of a long threaded bolt, washer, the hub to spread the load, the old bearing outer casing to sit nicely on the new bearing, then the knuckle, then a bar to pull against the knuckle and finally a nut.

I copper greased the mating surfaces to ensure it would slide in smoothly.

Once that’s in replace the circlip.


If you’ve removed the splash shield previously, refit it now as you will not get it back on otherwise.

Then onto pressing the hub into the new bearing (hub halfway in here).



This setup consisted of threaded bolt, washer, hub, knuckle, inner race from the old bearing and bar to spread the load.



Tap the little metal washer thing back into place and all done.

[firstlude]

top marks great right up just not sure about the idea of smacking one hammer with another but i am sure you where wearing the appropriate ppe for the job you where doing

[Drax]

brilliant write up needs to be on the Wiki