fredfox

Cruising down the road, I get an increasing roar from the right rear.
I put the spare on to eliminate a bad tire, still the same. I does change tone when I go around a turn.
Wheel bearing?

davek9

You could jack up the rear (both wheels put it in gear and listen to it, if it is real bad.
But it will most likely need some weight on it if it is just starting to go.
How many miles and are the wheel straight and balanced?

fredfox

wheels are good, like I said, I put the spare on and tried it.
I did have it on the jack and no noise then, just when I am running it, and it does change when I go into a turn.

davek9

The reason I asked "How many miles and are the wheel straight and balanced? ".

Is because high milage and a bent rim and or unbalanced wheel can GREATLY reduce the life of a wheel bearing.
From your discription it sounds like a good assumption, as you cannot check by wiggling them.

fredfox

98000 miles, sat for a while.

James Bailey

That does sound like a wheel bearing....

Mrmerlin

before taking it apart remove the wheel centercap and retorque the center nut 320 ft/lb if its loose this can also cause the same problem, if its tight then it time to swap it out

fredfox

well it cant be near as bad fixing this than what I just went through with the bent valves.

Dean_Fuller

I JUST replaced my WHEEL BEARING...it sounded just like what your discribing. Its not too bad a job with the right tool. I have the SIR TOOL kit that allows you to replace the WB without removing the carrier which will mess up you alignment.

Bill Ball

VERY bad bearings...

dr bob

Bill's videos are pretty cool. But.... These are double-row angular pressure BALL bearings, and the design really requires that the two cone sections are tightened together to make the proper pre-load. Without that stub axle installed and torqued correctly, you can't say for sure that the noisy bearing is the same as a bad bearing.

All that said, if you have over 100k on the car, you are either due or soon to be due for rear bearings. If you are on the Cali coast and can make it to Bills in the SF Bay area or down here to the L.A. area, we share a tool here that makes the job relatively painless. Dean Fuller has the same tool in the greater Texas metroplex area (wherever that is...) and there are likely others around. Fees for use range from Diet Pepsi to Bratwurst here, and maybe a shipping charge if the tool isn't where you and the car will end up. Dean is still amortizing the costs of his so a donation would probably help him more than a Pepsi right now. The tool lets you R&R the bearing without disassembling the suspension, a huge time and labor saver. I think we do both sides in 3-4 hours all in, including some tool cleaning and floor mopping.

Our local fair-rate shop, a guy who owns a few and works on a lot more, quoted me a good-guy price of $200 per side, and I would supply the bearings. That's SoCal shop rates which may be different than those in other places in the country. Doing it myself almost paid for the special tool, but I also robbed a local business of the $400 in work by sending away for the tool. At least half a dozen cars have been re-bearinged down here, and Bill has used it a few times now on cars at his place.

Bill Ball

Dr. Bob makes a good point about these bearings being under preload. Even w/o the axle nut torqued to ~322 ft lbs, new bearings or old bearings with any decent amount of lube left in them won't spin as freely as these dry ones. Unlike the front bearings, these are or should be sealed, so dry ones need to be replaced while the fronts can be repacked.

dr bob

This should say BALL BEARINGS. Fixed in the original post. My bad.

fredfox

Wow, It is like driving a new car. Got a used rear bearing carrier from Mason, took a whole 2 hours to change it out on the floor of my garage.
It makes for a whole new driving experience without that noise.