Das Race: My '97 M3/4/5

[Jake]

Mileage: 154,100 or something like that

I had a bit of a grumble going on when I put the car through left hand turns at Hyperfest and figured it was time to do the front wheel bearings, as they came from Jim's wrecked GTS2 car and were new at the time... 2+ years and many, many jumped curbs ago.

Ordered 2x bearings from FCP Euro. Only one showed up - though I called them this morning and they are overnighting me a second.

The process of bearing removal was easy enough. Borrowed the gigantor socket (46mm) from DJ and he was kind enough to give me the adapter to size it down from a 3/4" drive to 1/2". I realized that my breaker bar had gone missing, so off to Home Depot for (nothing but the best in Chinese crap) a Husky 1/2" breaker bar. Said bar promptly sheared apart as soon as I applied torque to remove the wheel bearing nut. Sigh. Ruined the bar and adapter. HD gave me my money back but it was a time suck to deal with them. Went to Sears, got some slightly-better-Chinese-crap Craftsman breaker bar and adapter, and the nut came right off.

The bearing exploded when I pulled it off. I know that's kiiiind of expected given they are just pressed together, but there were some plastic-y bits that came out with the bearings:



Definitely not normal and based on the racket it made, it was very due for replacement:

[youtube]SALsw8g2NZk[/youtube]

Only other snag I ran into was hammering the new bearing on. Didn't realize that the old inner race was still stuck on the spindle so I couldn't get the new bearing more than halfway on. Oops. Got the old race removed and the whole car is back together now. I'll have the other bearing in my hands tomorrow night and plan on doing that work shortly, so the car will have both front bearings replaced before Summit in a week or so.