Re: Welded wheel bearing

One time I was working in Santa Clara at an engineering software company. At the end of a day, I was leaving the parking lot and there was an old goat type staring into the open hood of his Italian sedan. I figured it was yet another software type who are useless around things mechanical, so I stopped to have a look. His car wouldn't start, not even. I looked, and sure enough the distributor body, a light metal casting, was broken all the way around and spinning freely. The guy commutes about 2 hours each way (the Bay Area is horrible for housing) and so I decided to try a last ditch cobble - I took a roll of duct tape out of my trunk, put the distributor where it was supposed to be - you could tell because the casting fitted together perfectly at that point - and taped it securely with duct tape. It started OK, so I told the guy to stop on his way home and order the part and I'd help him put it in. A few days after that I got sent out of the country for a couple of weeks and I forgot all about it. A few years later, I was at another company back home in Washington State, and I posted to a newsgroup relating to that Santa Clara company's products, and the old guy noticed it and replied to my posting (this was before the huge spam wave which forced me to disguise my reply-to address) and so we exchanged emails. It turns out that about ten years later he was STILL driving that car with his distributor duct taped. OH MY GAWD.

True story!

Grant

oldjag wrote:

You folks might get a kick out of this.  I had just towed my race car
trailer to the track with some friends following behind us with their
tow vehicle.  When we got to the paddock and started unpacking, JB the
guy following us, said he had a problem with noise from the left front
wheel of his tow vehicle.  He soon had the wheel off and found the
problem - the front inner axle bearing was toast, and the inner race
had spun on the axle.  The bearing fell apart but the race was stuck on
the axle.  I got him a puller from my tool box and he set to work
pulling the race off the axle.  He got worrried the puller would bugger
the end of the axle....so he grabbed one of the tapered rollers from
the broken bearing and stuck it in the hole on the end of the axle,
then uses the puller and extracts the bearing race from the
axle....great so far.  A little crocus cloth and the axle looked good,
so he gets new parts from the last still open store for about 100 miles
and starts assembling the bearing and hub.  Gets everything back on and
goes to put in the cotter pin for the axle nut and...oh *** the
tapered roller is now stuck flush with the end of the axle and is
blocking the cross drilled hole for the cotter pin!  No hope of
drilling a hardened bearing roller with any drill we had.  What to do?
I had a brain storm for an idea that I thought might have 5% chance of
working.  I grabbed a carbon steel crank handle from my ring gap filer,
(basicly just a piece of 3/16" diam. CS rod stock) and a set of heavy
duty jumper cables.  Connected the cables to the axle and the rod
stock, and had JB hold the rod against the end of roller.  I grabbed
the jumper battery and hooked it up for about 5 seconds. By this time a
small crowd of onlookers had assembled to watch and bet on the outcome.
To my total amazement, it welded the rod to the end of the roller.
Even more amazing, it yanked the roller out of the axle with the help
of a slide hammer without breaking off!  Of course I didn't let on that
I was as amazed as they were that this actually worked.....

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