How to Replace Front Wheel Bearing 1995-2011 Ford Ranger 2WD PART 1

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet. I am Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20 plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com, the right parts installed correctly. That's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video, we're going to show you how to replace the front wheel bearings on this 1996 Ford Ranger. This vehicle is rear wheel drive, tool drive in the rear. This procedure, there may be some variations by application but this procedure is basically the same for any vehicle that's rear wheel drive and has roller bearings in the front. Tools you'll need are jack and jack stands, half inch 15 millimeter, 19 millimeter and 27 millimeter sockets that will vary by vehicle. A breaker bar or pipe for added leverage if you needed it, large flat blade screwdriver or small pry bar, pliers, hammer, a flat tip or round impact tool to remove the bearing races, race installation tools or large sockets. You need sockets that are just slightly smaller than the races to drive them in, and a piece of two by six or bigger to work on if you don't have a good bench, wheel bearing grease and a torque wrench. Okay. Start out, there's a little slot in the cover. Take a screwdriver. Pry that off. Okay, now your wheel is held in by 19 millimeter bolts. If you don't have air tools, start on the ground, loosen the lug nuts, and then raise the vehicle. I'm going to use an impact wrench to remove. Fast forward here. As we remove the lug nuts and then remove the wheel and tire. Got the wheel off. Look and see our breaks actually are in decent shape on this vehicle. One things you do is on the rotors, just run the back of your fingernail up and down both the outside and the inside. Make sure you don't feel any large grooves and then you can see the pads.

I've still got probably 10, 20,000 miles on them, depending on how you use your brakes but we'll show you how to remove it and re-install the brakes anyways. Next thing you want to do is take your calipers off, which is these two bolts here. On this vehicle, these bolts are half inch. These might have been replaced. Not sure but yours could vary in size. They should come off pretty easy. Do a little fast forward again as we finish removing those two bolts. Okay, what you can do to take these off is take a large screwdriver or pry bar and pry out on caliper, that loosens it up. Okay. Caliper coming up right here and your brake pads just came right out and this one pulls out the back. I'm going to clap a little dust off them. You can see they are in pretty good shape. This groove right here is an indicator, once that groove disappears, that's when you know they needs to be replaced. Next thing you want do to is, if your rotor has a lot of wear on it or is in exceptionally bad shape, you'll want to replace that. I'll show you how to replace the rotor. On the back side here again, you want to remove two larger bolts here and up here. These bolts are 15 millimeter. I'm going to use a piece of pipe to put the pipe onto my ratchet and pull for some extra leverage. Get that top bolt, I turn the steering back a little bit. That clears the weight of the socket to hit on your lever bolt. Fast forward again here. Again, use the pipe, put it on the wrench. Also, if you have a breaker bar, that would work as well. Then, pull the bolts the rest of the way out and then the caliper bracket comes off.

With a regular screwdriver, you're going to pop this cap off, should come off easy maybe, you need to use a hammer or something. This grease cap. Side here, you want to use pliers to remove this cotter pin and then this cap comes off and then there's a nut underneath there. Okay, those pliers. Bring this down. Sometimes, the easiest thing to do is just pull. Break that off and then the pin comes right up and out and then that comes off. This nut is 27 millimeters and on this truck, comes right off by hand. That's not unusual. These are not supposed to be very tight at all. Take that nut off of there. Once that nuts off, you can just give a little pull on the disk and you'll see the washer and bearing come out. You can actually see the washer and the bearings come out. Caliper back there. That whole rotor comes out. See, on here, there's a seal. There's a seal here, so you want to get a screwdriver or some other type of tool right underneath there and pry that up. Okay, now that the seal's out, there's your inner bearing. Okay, so this here is your bearing race, okay, and you also have a race on the front part. What you want to do is you need a tool like this, an impact tool and you can scrape away some of this grease so that you can see the rim. If you look, my tool and scrape the hub and then it stops on that race. Okay, so once you do that race, you want to drive that race out of the hub.

Okay, a tool with the nice flat end. Okay, I'm going to speed it up here a little bit. Notice that I just use a couple taps in each location and I have to go back and forth. I tap on one side of the race and then I'll tap on the other side and then go over 90 degrees and just try and evenly drive it out of your rotor or drum or hub. Okay. There's your outer race out. There's that race, basically just a cup that the bearing runs in. Now, turn over rotor or your drum, actually just take a rag and d clean out a little bit, get some of the grease out so you can get at that outer race. Again, here, I'm trying to evenly drive that race out of the back side and doing that by just changing position often and not ever really hitting it too hard, just hard enough to get that race out of there. It will vary. Some vehicles, if that race has been there a whole long time and it has been corroded or rusted, you may have to try harder to get them out. Okay. There's the race for our inner bearing. Okay, wind this video there. We've gotten the rotor off and all the bearings, the race is out. Check out part two to see how you reinstall them.

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