Is Your Car or Truck Wheel Hub Stuck Tips on Getting it Loose

Are you replacing a hub bearing in a vehicle and when you go to remove it it's frozen, it's stuck on, it's not coming off. I'm gonna give you some techniques on how to remove it. So we've already gone over the basic techniques when we removed all the bolts and the nut from the axle. Just hitting the backside of the hub with a hammer, normally it loosens it up just enough so you can pull it off. It didn't work in our case. So we've gone over some other techniques. We used a slide hammer, which is my least favorite technique. It hurts your hand while you're using it and it didn't budge at all. So now we've got to get more creative. So using lots of rust penetrant, letting it soak for a long time. So then we tried from the backside of the hub taking one of the old bolts, putting it in, threading it, and then using an air hammer and try to hammering it from the backside. You could also use a sledgehammer and a punch and see if that worked. Didn't work in our case.

Then we decided to take one of the studs out and have a bolt go through here with a nut and try to press the bearing out this way. We had to cut the stud first because the stud is so long. It probably wouldn't come out if we just hammered it in. So we sliced it first with a cutoff wheel and then hammered it through. So now I loosened up this shield, I just took the bolts out of the shield just so I can access the backside of the knuckle so that it's not in my way. And this is an aluminum knuckle. So if this was a steel knuckle, there is exhaust spreaders that you might be able to get in between the knuckle ears and the hub and try to tighten those up and force that out, but we don't have that option. So I'm gonna take a bolt and a nut go and through here. And as I tighten the bolt up, it's gonna push the hub out. Now, I just wanna put some kind of a spacer or something in between the bolt and the knuckle. I don't wanna damage it. It is aluminum. So I'm just gonna use another nut. And now with a wrench on the nut. Tighten this up a little bit. See if I can just get this part of the hub assembly to move. So at this point, it's still not working out too well. We haven't even gotten this to budge. So what I'm gonna do is leave some pressure on this bolt and soak this down with a little more rust penetrant and then go to lunch, and come back, hopefully it'll be a little bit looser.

Another technique, if you were replacing the rotors, what you could do is put the rotor on backwards, bolted on, and then you have a little more area to hit with a hammer. We're gonna save our rotors. So we don't wanna do that in this situation. All right. Now I'm gonna tighten this up top. Let's see if this gets us any further. While this bolt is still tight, I'm just gonna take the sledgehammer. Just give it a couple taps. Hopefully, it'll loosen it up a little bit. All right. So this thing is frozen on there really good. So what I'm actually gonna do is there's some good surface area on the back of the knuckle near this stud. So I'm actually gonna cut this stud out and do the same thing, get another bolt and a nut and try to walk them together back and forth and try to get a little more pressure off. Hopefully, I can pull it off that way.

All right. So I got another bolt. Hold on. I'm just gonna put a little pressure on this. I'm using the best bolts that I can find, you know, whatever you got laying around. Tighten this one a little more. Soak down some more, give it a couple of hits while there's pressure on it. With the pressure from those two bolts from the front side still pushing back towards the knuckle, I'm going to use this adaptor, actually. You can put a socket on here for the air hammer. It gives us a try. Try to push it through. So with pressure still on the hub, still pushing it out, I'm gonna take the air chisel and right on the ears of where the hub body is, I'm just gonna try to spin the body a little bit, hopefully, loosen up some of that corrosion. And just go back and forth with it.

Now I'm just gonna try a bigger hammer. All right. So I have two more options. One option, I could the whole knuckle, take everything off, and bring this over to a press and push it through or even hit it through with a hammer. That'd probably work. That's kind of a last, last resort. I wanna try to avoid that. I'm just gonna take a torch and just heat up the hub just a little bit. I don't wanna get anything in the suspension too hot, I don't wanna heat up the knuckle, and I don't wanna heat up the hub part, potentially damaging the axle. So I'm just gonna use a little bit of heat, hopefully, loosen some things up, and hopefully, it's able to come off.

All right. So that didn't work either. They actually make a tool that bolts up to the lugs and it has a long pipe on the end of it and you hit it with a hammer. Well, we don't have that actual tool here. So what we're gonna do is take a long pipe wrench. Just attach it here. I am gonna lower the vehicle down a little bit, get this nice and tight. Looks good there. And then we're gonna try to hit the end of the pipe wrench and see if we can break them free. Alright. So l lowered this down on the floor jack just so the energy doesn't get transferred through the spring and the body of the vehicle. And just try again. All right. So I've exhausted all options that I can think of to get this hub off without taking the whole knuckle off. At this point, we've gone so far. It would've just been easier to take the knuckle off in the beginning. So I'm gonna support the lower suspension and take it off and try to hammer it out from the backside. So, overall, the snuggled didn't come out that difficult, and we were lucky none of the bolts were frozen. So from the backside, I did spray a little more rust penetrant on there, and I'm gonna support this. Hopefully, I don't wanna break the aluminum housing. I'm just gonna hammer it from the backside. All right. And try using the air hammer this time. Let's see if we can get it to budge.

So we finally got this separated. What we had to do was the backing shield off. We just bent it out of the way. I'm gonna bend that back to reuse it. If you had to, you can cut it and buy a new one. And then we put this in a press, put some pressure from the backside on the hub, pushing it out a little bit. And it's not really recommended that you do this, but while we had pressure on that, took the air hammer and chisel it down a little bit, and that was able to loosen it up enough to break free, which is awesome. Now, the reason why this corroded so much, well, we have two dissimilar metals. We have aluminum here and you have steel here. So that combination of the two likes corrosion, and it's gonna seize together and cause it very difficult to remove.

Normally hub bearings are not that difficult. This was the extreme, but we tried a lot of techniques. Normally those other techniques work, but sometimes they don't in our case. So if you have any ideas of other techniques that I didn't use, leave me a comment below, maybe I'll use them in the future. So if you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, turn off all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.

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