I recently tried to change the front wheel bearings in my 2001 Daewoo Lanos.
I checked online to see what part everyone was selling because I am often sold the wrong part when I try the stores first. Every site I saw was showing the picture of a $63 front roller bearing and much cheaper inner and outer ball bearings for the back. The ones I purchased matched the picture shown on all sites but when I went to put it in, it turned out that there were inner and outer ball bearings in the front, not the single roller bearing as pictured. I also found that the whole strut assembley was one piece and since the piece was pressed making it hard to put the original one back in after tearing it apart and re-packing (which obviously didn’t work well since it was not pressed back together)I decided to go to a junkyard and purchase another strut assembley from them including the strut, hub and bearings. Unfortunately because the junkyard was selling that piece for the strut and not the bearings, I don’t believe they kept it dry and all the rust inside the bearings made them louder than the ones I had taken out.
Where can I find a new strut assembly for this car?!?
This is the only thing wrong with it and there are only 80,000 on the car and I hate to have to junk an otherwise good running car because of the bearings.
This car eventually became the Chevy Aveo. Look at 2003 Aveo parts on line to see if they changed from the Lanos.
Can the ball bearing assemblies be removed from the hub? If so, you should be able to get around this by matching up the numbers that should be stamped on the side of the bearing race.
Most odd bearings I need can usually be matched up at Fleck Bearing, which has a number of facilities around the country.
A quick look shows a roller bearing for your car and I have no idea why yours would have 2 separate ball bearings unless there was a production change that was not accounted for.
That’s rare but it does happen on occasion.
It also reads as Daewoo producing one version and another version being produced under license in Poland.
It’s stated that at the end of the 2000 year a number of changes were made to the cars so you might check the production date (month and year stamped on the drivers door jam tag) and do some research on the VIN to find out just exactly what you have.
Yours is a 2001 so maybe it falls into that fuzzy area as it would likely have been built in either mid or late 2000.
I had thought of that and we did check inside the door and found it was made in December of 2000. I actually checked from 1997-20004 which I think would have covered all the years this car was made and every search came up with the same picture of the single roller bearing.
I will take the old one apart since we have already seperated it and I will see if I can find any numbers on it. I bought a service manual for this car online and downloaded it and the pictures are not great, but they look like what we have and note no changes of any kind.
I figured if there was a re-call or something that required a conversion kit then I would have found that on a google search. I went through the first 16 pages of a search for wheel bearings and strut assembly and found only the same pictures as what I was sold and a bunch of message boards where people were discussing how to remove the bearings (about being all one piece and having to take off the whole assembly ect) None of those people mentioned that when they took this apart that they found something other than what they were sold to replace it with.
I found that really odd.
I will look into that, thanks!
My point about productions changes is something I’ve actually seen a few times over the years.
The most blantant one that I can think of involved a reverse gear set on a manual transmission Subaru. There were some problems with this set from new. (Delivery issue, not a car manufacturing fault)
After disassembling a transmission I discovered the parts that had been ordered (not by me) did not match what was in the transmsission. Not even close.
The part numbers were correct but the parts were not. They were reordered and the same thing happened. Long story short the parts dept. ordered this gear set 2 more times and in all 4 cases the parts were the same but were wrong.
Finally they drug the Subaru parts rep in on this deal and it took him almost half a day on the phone before it was discovered that Fuji Heavy Industries (maker of Subarus) made a change on the production line and did not even tell Subaru of America (their sales/parts/service wing) about this.
This meant that no one involved with SOA or the dealerships had any knowledge of this change and every single parts book was wrong.
If the bearings come out of the hub you should be able to match them up because most bearings are made by only a few companies and will cross-reference from one to the other if necessary.