Noisy Car or Truck Wheel While Driving Could be a Bad Wheel Bearing

Do you have a bad wheel bearing? Well, it might sound something like this.

That's what we're gonna talk about in this video.

So when I'm driving this vehicle around, I could hear a groaning noise coming from the front of the vehicle. It was hard to tell whether it was coming from the right side or the left side. When I would go about 30 miles an hour and take a little bit of a left turn, you could hear the noise more and that was actually loading up the right-side tire. And when you turn to the left a little bit, it almost went away.

So that being said, most of the time when you have a bad wheel bearing and you turn so that it loads up that side, it gets worse, but that's not always the case. Sometimes it can be the opposite. So the groaning noise is just in the beginning stages on this vehicle. It's not extremely loud, so we couldn't capture it out on the road. So what we did was we took the microphone, put it attached to a screwdriver, put the vehicle up in the air, and while running it, we were able to get the noise.

So this is an all-wheel-drive vehicle and we were able to turn off the traction control because you don't want to be driving this with all four wheels going when it's trying to do its traction control thing. It's gonna mess it up. So when you get the wheels going pretty fast, we were able to hear the noise. Now, if you use a stethoscope or even a long screwdriver, you could hold it right up here on the knuckle and the noise should go and you should be able to hear it from right there.

If you're checking the wheel bearing out like this, just make sure you be careful. Here, we have a couple of bearings. We have one setup that has ball-bearings and we have another setup that has roller bearings. These are little rollers. They do the exact same thing.

So you have the housing right here and you have races in there. That's what they call these. These are races and the bearings ride on those races. We have bearings on both sides that holds that together and then the bearings would spin well while the hub is in there.

And what happens is one of these bearings goes bad, whether it's the inboard one or the outboard one that's when you're going to get your noise. Same thing goes with ball-bearings. So you have ball-bearings on this side and then you have ball-bearings right there and that goes on that race right there in the hub just like that.

And sometimes you'll get something that got in there, whether it be a piece of dirt or something just wasn't machined properly, or just over time the grease doesn't do its job. So when you have a bad bearing, it's gonna sound kind of like that.

And sometimes if you have a vehicle with a coil spring, you can put one hand on the coil spring and then try to spin the wheel and you can actually feel the reverberation through the coil spring depending on how bad the wheel bearing is. If you spin it like this, sometimes you can just hear it. I can hear it. Then on the other side, this is how it should sound. I don't hear it. Anything I hear I can actually hear from the other side.

One more thing else you can check is grab the top of the wheel and grab the bottom of the wheel and then push the top and pull the bottom and back and forth. And if you feel any play in there, you just want to make sure if you look at the caliper, you can actually put one of your hands in there and tread and just shake the top of the wheel. See if you get any play in there and that will tell you the wheel bearings back. But you can still have a wheel bearing that has noise and not have any play in it.

So we determined the right front wheel bearing is the bad one and we're gonna replace it with one from 1aauto.com. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring that bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.