The Stovebolt Site Forums The Parking Lot Big Bolts GMC 450 - Oil in front hubs?

When I disassembled the front hubs on my '52 GMC 450 COE there was oil in the front hubs. I'm to the point of putting everything back together after reworking the brakes. Question is, why was there oil in the front hubs (space between two oil seals, where the front wheel bearings are)? I know that newer trucks run oil in the front hubs, but the maintenance manual says nothing about adding oil. Just clean, repack and reassemble. I can't even figure out how that would be acomplished without driving the truck up on the side of a big hill. Any thoughts.
Thanks, Scott

Running oil in front wheels and trailer axles did not become popular until later. Here is a link the company that developed the hub oil seals. http://www.stemco.com/Company/History/tabid/66/Default.aspx Most trucks that were still in use in the 60's were retrofitted. All it took was a Stemco seal and a wear ring on the spindle. I haven't run oil in hubs in about 15 years. While the hub oilers were a big improvement over packing wheels with wheel bearing grease, running a semi fluid grease such as Mobillith 007 in steering and trailer is more cost effective now. I have practically no seal failures any more.

i think your grease just melted down overtime and that's what your seeing. my 51 350 was like that when i got it.

Thanks, should I just pack the bearings or should I put some extra grease in the hub? All I've ever done is just pack the bearings but the hubs definately had extra in there. I wiped all that out so now it's pretty clean, other than what grease is on the bearing themselves.

I just pack the bearings, I was taught that filling the hub with grease does more harm than good.

Grigg

Filling the cavity with old fashioned wheel bearing grease does more harm than good. However, the hub oilers extended service intervals by many fold. Using the same type of seals as with hub oilers except filling the cavity about half full of semi fluid grease cuts the maintenance intervals to almost the life of the truck. It is original equipment on class 8 vehicles now. There is much literature about wheel end service available. Old grease doesn't melt, it gets hard. As I mentioned before,many trucks that were still used hard in the 60's were quite oftenretrofitted to hub oilers. Repacking wheel bearings was hard work and had to be preformed often. However, an old truck that is only going to be driven a couple of thousand miles a year, repacking with todays wheel bearing grease will work for a long time.

Thanks gentlemen. I'm sure this truck only has the regular type seals on it. In fact I'm going to have to cut the outside seals because I can't find any.
I have always just repacked the bearings on our farm trailers and trucks. The Maintance Manual says to repack every 10k miles or once per year. I probably won't put 10k miles on this truck in 10 years. Thanks again.
Scott