I purchased an 01’ Corolla with 91,000 miles. In the last 25,000 miles I’ve had to replace the front passenger wheel bearing 5 times. It’s been done by 3 different mechanics. Once the hub was changed as well. I’ve recently put on new tires and had the car alligned, it happened after that. My question is what could be causing them to go bad? The bearings are under warrenty, but it is still a chore to take the car in for a new bearing every few months.
What is the sympton of the bearing failure?
Bearing wear is rapidly accelerated by incorrect preload (too tight or too loose), wrong or insufficent grease, harmonic vibration, and forces for which they were not designed.
You make have loose splines on that CV half shaft that are causing destructive harmonic vibrations.
A visual examination by a competent bearing expert will instantly disclose the failure mechanism, then you can search for the root cause.
If by symptom you mean how do we know it is bad, it always makes a rough sound that coorelates with the rootational speed of the wheel. It usually starts all of the sudden and sometimes, if it takes us a couple weeks to get the car in, we’ll be able to start to feel it as well as hear it.
When a score like this starts to rack up I must question pretty much 100% about the situation. Are these mechanics simply doing work to stay busy, as wheel bearings don’t fail this early? someone must put a stop to simply doing the same thing as the previous guy did.