loose rivet
Petty Officer 2nd Class
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2011
- Messages
- 151
I just got done going over a trailer a buddy just bought used. It came with a small boat he just got. I won't say where but it wasn't a private sale.
He came to me asking what 'slightly worn spindles' meant.
The dealer told him that they had gone over everything, trailer included and that he'd be good for a year or two before having to mess with the trailer. He said two of the wheels felt loose, he was told it was just 'wear on the
spindles'.
I pulled all four wheels and hubs off to find that the left side bearings were wrong, they used 1 1/6" bearing cones on 1" spindles, and to make it worse, they had glued the bearing caps on, plus wrapped each one with duct tape and painted over it. It has an internal style bearing buddy, something similar to Red Eye hubs. My take is that it spun a bearing in the hub at some point, so their fix was to grind the bearing a bit, apply liberal amounts of epoxy, and pound the bearing race in shimming it with a strip cut from a Mountain Dew can.
All of this is of course supersedes the obvious which was that one hub was 5 lug, the rest were 4 lug, covered with cheap plastic hub caps to hide the obvious.
To top it all off, they used red Locktite to hold on several nearly stripped out lug bolts, nor the 5/16" U bolts holding the axles to the springs. The 8 penny nails, or 'cotter pins' added a nice touch as well.
The bearings, other than half of them being wrong, were all pitted, not real bad, but pitted and basically doomed to fail. There were no grease seals, but someone had installed round hard plastic washers behind the inner bearing which were crushed by the inner bearing against the seal area. They appeared similar to those plastic spacers behind the window crank on a pickup truck.
One new hub, all new bearings, all new hardware, and its roadworthy again. So much for "You won't have to deal with the trailer for at least a few more years".
He came to me asking what 'slightly worn spindles' meant.
The dealer told him that they had gone over everything, trailer included and that he'd be good for a year or two before having to mess with the trailer. He said two of the wheels felt loose, he was told it was just 'wear on the
spindles'.
I pulled all four wheels and hubs off to find that the left side bearings were wrong, they used 1 1/6" bearing cones on 1" spindles, and to make it worse, they had glued the bearing caps on, plus wrapped each one with duct tape and painted over it. It has an internal style bearing buddy, something similar to Red Eye hubs. My take is that it spun a bearing in the hub at some point, so their fix was to grind the bearing a bit, apply liberal amounts of epoxy, and pound the bearing race in shimming it with a strip cut from a Mountain Dew can.
All of this is of course supersedes the obvious which was that one hub was 5 lug, the rest were 4 lug, covered with cheap plastic hub caps to hide the obvious.
To top it all off, they used red Locktite to hold on several nearly stripped out lug bolts, nor the 5/16" U bolts holding the axles to the springs. The 8 penny nails, or 'cotter pins' added a nice touch as well.
The bearings, other than half of them being wrong, were all pitted, not real bad, but pitted and basically doomed to fail. There were no grease seals, but someone had installed round hard plastic washers behind the inner bearing which were crushed by the inner bearing against the seal area. They appeared similar to those plastic spacers behind the window crank on a pickup truck.
One new hub, all new bearings, all new hardware, and its roadworthy again. So much for "You won't have to deal with the trailer for at least a few more years".
