Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2003 12:03 pm Post subject:
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On mine, the trac-off, service vehicle soon, and anti-lock lights all came on. I ran with mine bad from April 4 of this year to about a week ago. So you can run with it bad. I replaced mine because I want traction control and ABS for the winter.
To change it:
1. Get a 1 and 3/8 inch socket and, with the car on the ground, loosen the axel nut. You may need a breaker bar for this.
2. Put the car on jacks and take off the wheel, then spin off the axel nut that you already loosened.
3. Take off the caliper and caliper bracket. Use a wire hanger or piece of wire to hang the caliper out of the way (don't stretch or kink the brake line).
4. Pull off the rotor.
5. Just behind the rotor you will see the plug where the hub plugs into the wire going to the computer. Unplug it.
6. Remove the three bolts in back of the hub that attach the hub to the steering knuckle. These can get tough. The one on top is the worst. You need a small socket wrench and a 13 mm socket. Get it out just enough so you can get an open-ended wrench on it, and finish removing it with that. All three bolts will probably be real tight (corroded in place), so have something nearby you can throw when you scrape the skin off your knuckles and get pissed off.
7. Get yourself a hub puller from a local tool rental place. An adjustable, twist-type one is easiest, because I went to autozone twice, and neither of the ones they had to loan out were the right size. Before I finally got the right one, I tried beating the hell out of the axel with a mallet to free it from the hub, and it wouldn't budge, so I don't think the slide-hammer type of hub puller would have worked for me. Twist the puller on and just crank the hub out from the axel / steering knuckle. Be careful not to pull out on the hub AND the axel, because there is only a limited amount of play in the axel joints down the line.
8. Guide the plug and wire through the hole past the axel.
9. Clean all of the now-exposed areas real good, and slip the new hub in, guiding the new plug and wire through the hole past the axel.
Put everything back together in reverse order of above, and you're good to go. When you tighten the axel nut, make sure to crank it on tight to properly seat the axel into the hub.
Now for me, I stripped two of the heads of the 3 hub / steering knuckle bolts because I wasn't careful enough, so I just replaced them all, as well as the main axel nut. Got everything from my dealer for about $10.00. Once everything was apart, it took only 25 minutes to get it back together and clean up. So if you have all of your tools and parts before you start, you should be able to do this job in less than half a day. Have fun!
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