by daveesl77 » Sun Jul 05, 2015 2:16 pm
It was pretty weird. Near as we can figure, the actual cast metal of the hub began to disintegrate at the studs, this caused at least two studs to begin to wobble. They were still torqued properly to the nut, but a wobble began inside the stud hole of the hub. This then caused more studs to start to fail. The tire place we got it to spent over 20 minutes having to cut off the studs, but all 5 were still there. Oh, and the tire place refused to charge for their work said they'd seen a few of these like this over the years. We had them cut off the studs as we wanted to see what was happening between the wheel and the hub. You couldn't remove them by a wrench as the splines just tore out immediately. There are almost perfectly identical wear patterns on the old hub at each stud location. Also, I had personally torqued all lugs by hand and not with a gun. I had triple checked everything the day prior to this trip.
Once I got to NY I pulled down both wheels and repacked the bearings on both the remaining HF hub and the new TS hub, both were fine. Repeated this again today now that I'm home and yes they are fine.
The bearings were fine and no damage done at all to the spindle. It was just a failure of the casting of the hub. Went to HF today, they said they did not have any trailers in stock today, but should have some next week and will replace both the wheel and hub. That works for me, as it gives me a full spare.
Weirdest part of all this is that there was absolutely no indication prior to this that something was wrong. I was stopping every 75-100 miles to check the wheels, as I always do on a new trailer or bearing pack. No excess heat, no sign of tire wear. On that final stop, at about 250 miles, it was to get gas I did not need and was just lucky I saw the problem. I seriously doubt the trailer would have made another 10 miles.
I've been building cars and stuff for decades and while I've seen a few bearing and stud failures, I've never seen anything like this.
dave