How to Replace Front Wheel Hub Bearing 2002-14 Volvo XC90

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, we're working on our 2004 Volvo XC90, and we're going to be replacing a left front wheel bearing. It's going to be very simple. I can do it. You can do it, too. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Okay, friends, so just a quick note. We're going to be doing a lot of videos on replacing parts on this particular vehicle, so if you happen to notice in the video that you're watching all of a sudden a part just is brand new and it wasn't brand new before, odds are we cut out. We were doing another job, we replaced that part, we cut back in, and we're just showing you the stuff that you need to know to be able to do your particular replacement.

Okay, friends, so now what we're going to do is we're going to loosen up the wheel. I've got my vehicle supported from the ground, but the wheel's still touching so that it can't spin while I do this. I'm just going to use my 19 millimeter. I have a thin wall socket on there so it can squeeze in between the rim and the lug nut. I'm just going to break it free. It's a tight one. That's the reason for doing it while it's still on the ground. If you tried doing this up in the air, the wheel, of course, is going to spin.

Okay, so I've got three out of my five lug bolts out. This is what the look like right here. They screw directly into the wheel bearing. Once you take off this one right here, and then you go to take this one off, there's going to be nothing holding this wheel on, so you need to pay attention to that. I'm just going to take this one lug here, lug bolt, put it in a couple of threads. That's just so the wheel won't be able to come off and potentially hurt me. Push my wheel up against, just grab it. I'm holding the wheel so it can't fall down at this point. We'll just grab it off and set it aside safely.

Okay, so we have these little covers. They're hollow. There's one right here, and there's one right up here. That's just for the caliper sliders. They protect them from moisture and debris and all that, and they're very easy to pop out. You can just use your pry bar or screwdriver or whatever you want. Then we'll come in here, and we're going to take out these sliders. They should be an Allen head, 7 millimeter. This is what your Allen looks like. It's the shape of a stop sign. 7 millimeter. Here we are. Almost out. It's unscrewed completely at this point. It's just in the rubber. Normally, I would just leave it in at this point, but I want to show you what it looks like, so I'll just grab my pliers, try to pull it out of here.

There we are. This is the slider. This portion right here goes in and out inside the boot, and this part right here screws into the bracket. We'll set this aside, and we'll grab the second one out. Here it is, second one. Same as the first. We'll make sure we clean these up good before we reinstall them.

Okay, so for this, I'm going to use my pry bar and a screwdriver. We're going to take out this clip right here. To do that, I'm going to use my screwdriver. Get right in here. I'm going to twist and pop that right out of there. If I had a third hand, I could've caught it, but it is what it is. That's what it looks like. There's a little tab right here. It slides down in here. This thing right here just flexes, and that's what holds it. Okay. We'll set this aside. Now, we'll just grab our caliper, give it a little wiggle. This is one giant caliper. I don't know if I've seen one this big for something like this, but okay.

All right, we'll just get this hanging. Put it right up on the coil, hopefully. Here we are. That's just so we're not hanging it off of the flex hose. This is a giant caliper, it probably weighs quite a bit, and we don't want to put any tugs on our flex hose. I'm going to use my 18 millimeter socket with a nice long ratchet, and we're going to remove this bolt right here and this bolt right here. Oh, yeah. Try doing that with a short ratchet.

Once they break free, it's easy peasy. Our caliper bolt. This one, I'm holding the bracket of course. Bolt number one and bolt number two, both look the exact same. Looks like we have some thread locker on there, so I'll make sure I clean that off before I re-install. And then of course it would be your prerogative if you want to use thread locker in the end.

We're just going to remove this right here. I'm going to use my 10 millimeter on my ratchet. That's holding the rotor on. Okay. Because generally speaking, most wheel bearings have studs that come out and that'll hold the rotor from falling off on you. This one, not so much. It also helps keep the rotor from moving around on a new install. And that way there you don't get any rust and debris behind there. So there's what our little mounting bolt looks like. It's very small. We don't want to lose it because we need it. All right, so we're just going to spray this down real quick, coming along here. Here we are. Spray up in here. This is where the ABS sensor is. That looks pretty great. Let's go on the back here, why not. Cool.

All right. We're going to come back up to the front here. We're going to have to remove this axle bolt right here. And yes, I said axle bolt. It's on axle nut like almost every other vehicle. Volvo's Volvo, whatever. So we're going to remove this right here, and that's going to make it so the axle can go in and out of the bearing. And then once this can move, we'll be able to get to these bolts right here, which if you don't take out the axle bolt, you won't be able to get these bolts out because the axle's in the way. Okay.

Let's go ahead and remove this bolt. I'm going to use my half inch air gun with my 14 millimeter socket. Safety glasses of course. Just get this out of here. Here we are. You'll notice the threads have a lot of grease on them. That's because this is actually a through bolt, goes right through the bearing and then into the axle, and this is actually axle grease. So it works out nice. Helps keep moisture out of there for you and the bolt won't snap off hopefully taking it out.

We're going to take the ABS wire out of its brackets. That's going to give us a little bit of slack because what we're going to have to do is take this off and this off, take those bolts out, and bring our knuckle down away from our strut unit. And that's going to make it so we can pull the axle out a little bit to be able to get our bearing bolts. Okay. I'm just going to go like this. This little bonk.

There we are. That gives us a little bit of slack when we're here. Pull this one out of here. Look at all the slack we have now. This is super important because you definitely do not want to put a tug on your ABS wire. Okay? If you end up ripping this, it's going to be a costly repair, and let's avoid it. So let's move along.

The nut side of these is a 21 millimeter. I'm going to use my air gun for that and on the backside is an 18 millimeter. I'm going to hold the bolt side. I'm going to take off the 21 millimeter nut with my air gun. I've got my safety glasses on. Super important.

We need to get this so it holds. There we are. I'm going to leave the bolt in and I'm going to do the other side or the bottom side. Okay. So we got those nuts off of there. We want to pay special attention to our ABS wire at this point because as we take out these bolts, this is what the lower bolt looks like by the way, and it should be the same as the upper one. Let's just take a look real quick. Yep. Exact same. We don't have to worry about mixing those up. Set that aside.

Now as this comes down, it's going to want to pull on this. We want to make sure that we don't put a tug on this. Like I said before, I'm just going to restate it because it's super important. I'm trying to save you some money and make sure everybody's safe along the way here. As I'm bringing this down, I'm trying to pull the axle out. Here we are. This gives us plenty of room along the backside here to get to where our bolts are. So let's work on those now.

Now it's time to remove the mounting bolts for our front wheel bearing. To do that, I'm going to use my 15 millimeter. I'm just going to put it on there like this. I'm going to hold it and I'm going to use my rubber mallet. See if I can get it to break free. If you want to use an air gun for something like this, it might be helpful for you. For the purpose of this video, I'm just going to do it this way. Could also use a ratchet if you think you've got enough room to get it in between here and here. To me it's doubtable, but you do you boo-boo. It's a 15 millimeter. Take it off.

All right, I'm going to take off the tie rod end nut. It's an 18 millimeter. Of course, it almost came off, but not all the way. If that happens, you could just use some leverage. Usually that helps. I'm going to go up against the control arm and then up against the tie rod. Try to lift up the tie rod into the knuckle. I didn't bring the car down. Let's just try switching guns here. Okay. So what's happening is we're spinning the nut, which is in turn spinning the stud for the tire rod end. So what we're going to do is we're going to heat up this nut a little bit and then we'll try blasting it again.

Just use our torch here. Got to get this heated up. Try to pay special attention and make sure I'm not blowing this torch at the actual boot down there. Okay. I'm just going to put these back in, just like that. Now when I try to lift on this, the knuckle can't flop around on me. Grab my tool, 18 millimeter again. Let's see if we got a little bit more leverage with the nut moving.

Definitely looks like it's starting to come off. It's just taking its sweet time. Hot nut. Set that aside. All right. Let's get these back out of here. Take this. Now we can move the knuckle all around, which is going to be helpful for our cause here. I'm going to get the axle right out of the way. Once again, we're still being very careful for our ABS wire. At this point this can move around quite a bit, so you definitely do not want to put a tug on that. We're going to finish taking out these wheel bearing bolts. I can get my nice half inch gun in here. Nothing stopping us now.

Wheel bearing, this is the wheel bearing bolt right here I mean. Obviously it's not a wheel bearing. Bolt number two, same as the first. Set it aside. Do the same to the other two. All right. Just get the axle out of the way. Seems crazy to have to keep doing this, but we do what we got to do. Put this in here. Here we are. That's going to hold the knuckle from flopping around while we continue. And to continue what we're going to do, is we're going to take our hammer. We're going to give this a few loving bonks and see if we can get it to separate from the knuckle.

Okay friends, here we go. We've got our big fabulous hammer here. We're going to give the wheel bearing a couple of whacks, see if we can get it out of there. There we are, starting to separate, this right here, goes right into the center there, and it pretty much just protects it from getting moisture and all that in there. I got a lot of spray in there as you could tell, but it looks pretty decent. Looks like it kept the threads nice and clean. Like I said, you can see it starting to separate. So at this point, at any given time, it might decide it wants to let free. So you want to make sure when it does let free, your leg's not under there, your head's not under there, you don't have any kids running around, do anything crazy right here.

Let's continue. Looking good. There we are. There's your left front wheel bearing. Easy peasy. So here we are friends, a quick product comparison for you. Over here we have our front wheel bearing out of our 2004 Volvo XC90. We just removed it. It was very easy. Over here we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part. Both these parts are made to the exact same specifications, which is super important. You've got the same mounting holes, got where the axle goes through. Of course, it's got a brand new seal here, protects the bearings on the inside there. And then if you could see it, behind this hub area, there's another seal in there. That keeps the moisture out of there and it keeps the grease in there, keeps everything flowing great for you right going down the road for a long, long time.

With that said, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a quality part to install into the vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1aaauto.com. Thanks.

You'll notice right inside here where the wheel bearing rides inside your knuckle assembly, you've got a lot of buildup. It's pretty nasty. I like to get that out of there. Can use something like this. This is a brush you can get right at 1aauto.com. Give it a nice little scrape. That looks much better already. If you had some parts cleaner, you can go ahead and use that as well. I'm just going to get off the big chunks first, and then we'll use some parts cleaner and see what we're dealing with. If there's any large areas that the brush just won't seem to take off, I'll get it off with my pry bar or a screwdriver or whatever you have access to will come right off. This actually, it looks like it's coming out really good. I'm excited about that. Along here, this is where the bearing gets pressed up against by those bolts. That's also super important to make sure you have it clean where the bearing sits.

There's going to be a lot of areas where the bearing doesn't actually sit on that you don't necessarily have to worry about. But if you are worried about it, the brush isn't working, this isn't working, go something like this. We also sell these at 1aauto.com. It's great. Get a little sanding disc for it. It'll clean up nice. I'll show you what I'm talking about. Of course, you want to wear your safety glasses. Just go like this. You're not going to get much cleaner than that. This thing has a lot more power. I'm really just feathering it. You can really, you can get into it if you need it too, but for this application just nice and light. I'd say that looks pretty great.

Let's hit it with some parts cleaner real quick. Make sure you have your catch bucket under there. You don't want any contaminants getting into the ground, hurting mother nature. Anytime you're using chemicals, you should wear gloves. It's pretty basic. I'm just going to mention it. This looks beautiful. We'll put it in a little bit of copper Never-Seez, and then we'll mount in our brand new quality 1A Auto part.

You don't have to go too crazy and making sure that it's perfect. We just want it so that it will help keep the moisture out of there. And if for some reason down the line, you need to do something where you need to get the bearing back out, you can just give it a couple loving bonks and it should come right out for you. So as you could tell, a lot of our bolts that we took out, have thread lockers still on them. I'm just going to take them over to a wire wheel and I'm going to clean them up. If you don't have the wire wheel, you can use your little wire brush. I like to try and get off any remaining residue that's on there so I have something clean to start with. I'll go clean these up. We'll move along.

Okay. We've got all the bolts that's going to hold our wheel bearing on and of course our axle. I removed thread locker from these four which held the bearing to the knuckle. So I'm just going to go ahead and apply a little bit, just a teeny bit on each one. I don't need to go too crazy with it. Volvo recommends that you replace these bolts. So if you have access to a Volvo dealer, you can go ahead and order some. That's completely up to you. It's your prerogative. They recommend it. So I would recommend going with whatever they recommend. But for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to show you how to do the installation of the bearing, and you can make your own decision on what you want to replace and what you don't.

I've got those four a little bit of thread locker on them. I'm not going to thread lock this one. Let's move along to the next step. Let's go ahead and get these out of here again. I know what you're thinking, in out, in out, in out. I get it. It's just the way it is. There we are.

We've got our brand new quality 1A Auto bearing here. Just going to line it up. It looks like it's going to go right like that. That looks great. All of our holes are going to line up. Cool. Take one of our bolts. Can see where it's starting to try to thread into the bearing here. Like I said, Volvo recommends replacing these bolts. I'll just state it one more time for you. Got my other three. We get them all started before we go ahead and tighten any of them down. Last one. Put that axle out of the way.

Cool. They're all started. I'm going to grab my ratchet. We'll just bottom them out real quick and then we'll torque them down. Okay. I'm just snugging these up right now. I started with up here and then I'm going to go crisscross down to there so that way there hopefully it'll draw the bearing in straight because if you go here and then here, you might kind of kink it this way, but then it's sitting off on the rearward side. So we want to try to go in as straight as possible. I'm just going into crisscross manner here. Like I said before, I'm going to bottom it out and then we'll torque it down after we get them all bottomed out.

We'll just get this back up in here a little bit. The whole reason why I keep going in and out is because there's different times when you need it to be able to maneuver and move around. And then there's other times where you need to just stay in place. Where we're going to be torquing this down, now would be a great time for it to stay in place. So we'll just drive these in, and that's going to give us a little bit of space right here so we can still work. The axle's not in. We can tighten these down. We don't have to worry about the knuckle moving around too, too much on us. If we didn't have these in, the knuckle's going to move around. We're going to be trying to torque. It's going to be a nightmare. So let's continue.

For our first time around, we're going to go with 20 Newton meters. Okay. It's not foot-pounds or anything like that. It's Newton meters. 20 Newton meters. With our 15. You actually have to take three passes on this. So here it is. We're just going to go around in crisscross here. Now we're going to go to 45 for our second pass. All right. Now we're going to go an extra 60 degrees. This is our third and final pass. All right, go for our top bolt here. Go for 60. Let's see if I can get it. Here we are. A little bit more. There it is.

All four of those wheel bearing to knuckle bolts are tightened. We did all three steps. We can move ahead to the next step. Get these back out of here again for probably the 10th time. Okay though. It's not hurting them. It really doesn't hurt me any. We're going to take our axle and put it right through here. If you want to put a little Never-Seez on there, probably couldn't hurt. It's going to go right directly into the bearing because it's easier. Take my axle, get it situated, so it's ready to slide in. I'll go in here. Here we are. Align this back up. Here we go again for definitely the last time. Set it out of the way. Here we are. These bolts go through from the front to the rear.

We're going to put our two nuts on here. These are the nuts that hold the strut to the knuckle. Let's get those going. You can use thread locker if you'd like. We'll let that be your prerogative. You make your own decision. It couldn't hurt to have some on there, but it's not necessary. This is rubber along the outside. Like I said before, it kind of just keeps moisture out from getting in there. It also has a metal bushing in here, inside the center, which presses through and goes right up against the axle.

I want to make sure I have all my crud off of here. You can see it has some buildup right there. I would like to get that off of there so I can make sure that I have a nice flush mount up against our axle in there. Okay, I got off the big stuff. If you're still worried about it, you want to look pretty, use our 1A Auto brush here. Not going to get much better than that if you ask me. Clean up around the edges here. Make sure we don't have any large debris around there because we need this to make a nice seal. That looks good.

This bolt right here, Volvo recommends you replace it. Once again, if you have access to a Volvo dealer and you felt like going down, getting this bolt, you can go ahead and do it. For the purposes of this video, it's just an instructional video. I'm going to state to you, Volvo recommends to replace it, but I'm going to show you how to re-install this. We'll go with the assumption you have a new bolt.

I'm just going to bottom this out and then we'll go ahead and torque it down. It's time to snug these up. I'm going to use my 18 on the forward side or the bolt side. Then my 21 on the rearward side. I'm just going to give these a quick blast, just to get them bottomed out, and then we'll make sure we torque them down to the proper specification.

Okay, so I'm going to torque this down. I've got my 21 millimeter socket on my torque wrench. We're going to go 77 foot-pounds. Here we are. I'm going to grab the lower one. This is actually a two-step procedure. Once we get both of these torques to 77, we'll move ahead to the next step. There's 77. Leave that on there. Now we're going to do a little angle torquing. Now we're just going to try to bring this around a little further. I'm using a different tool here to show you a different angle sensing tool. We're going to bring it around to 90 degrees. A little more. Got to love Volvo. Love them. I don't think I'm going to get too much closer than that. If that's not tight enough, I don't know what it is.

Now it's time to get the tie rod nut on here. We've got our outer tie rod. The stud comes up through the knuckle. Just get that up in there. Now, remember when we took this off, the stud was spinning quite a bit. So when we put it back on, it's going to do the same thing. I'm just going to try to use my pry bar here. I'm going to try to put upward pressure at the same time as I try to tighten this down with my 18 millimeter. Once I get it so it's bottomed out, we'll go ahead and torque it down. Safety glasses. Here we go. Here we are. Let's grab our torque wrench. We're going to tighten this down to 59 foot-pounds. Here we are. We know that's tight. Move along to the next step.

Now we're going to get our ABS wire back in here. Just bring this around, pull it up and through so it's in the channel, and just slide it in. I like to give them a little wiggle, make sure it doesn't fall out. Do the same to the lower one here. When you push, you can try to roll it. Usually that helps to go in a little easier. There's our ABS wire. It's nice and mounted. It's not dangling, doing whatever it wants to do all willy-nilly. If for some reason you're missing a clip, you just want to make sure that you have this secured so it can't flop around, potentially get caught on anything.

Now for our initial tightening of this, we're going to do 35 Newton meters, which is not very much. It's pretty much just bottoming it out. Just see if we can bring this around. Let's take something through right here. Put this through because it's what I've got. Okay. This is bottomed out. Now there's a second step to this where we're going to have to take it and turn it in an extra 120 degrees. To do that, I'm going to put it in two lug nuts or lug bolts I guess you'd say. I guess it's habit to say lug nuts. Just put those in there for now. Now we'll bring the vehicle down and I'm going to show you a pry bar trick, and we'll finish tightening this up.

We really only needed one of these lug bolts on here to do this trick. We're essentially just going to, we're going to screw this in so you can feel it starting to come out the backside here so we know we've got some really good threads going through. We don't have to worry about stripping out our new hub on our bearing. Let's put our pry bar in there like this. What that's going to do is it's going to prevent this from turning. Now that we've done our first pass on this, we're going to continue adding 120 degrees to this. I'm just going to start here.

All right, so there we are. That's nice and torqued down now. Get our pry bar out of there and we can continue on the next step. I'm just going to get our lug bolts out of here. Threads look great. Did no damage. That's always nice.

Okay. So now we're going to do is we're going to put on a little bit of copper Never-Seez here. That's just going to help the rotor come off, if you ever have to take it off again someday. 60,000 miles or whatever, you maybe want to do another brake job. We've got our quality 1A Auto rotor here. This is where that little bolt is going to go through, and it's going to go through any one of these holes. So you don't really have to worry too much about that. Let's get this up on here. Get our little bolt.

Okay. It's just a small bolt so I didn't need to go out here and give it like a bonk, bonk, bonk, try to break it off in there. It's not about breaking things. It's about getting the job done. The rotor's on. Let's move ahead to the next step.

We've got our bracket. Just get this right over here. We got our two bolts. It's up to you if you want to go ahead and use some thread locker on them. We'll leave it up to you. I'm not going to get mad at you. Stuff like this, I like to use a little dab. That's your prerogative. You do you boo-boo. I'm going to snug this up. Bottomed out, bottomed out. Let's torque it down. This is going to be two steps, 26 foot-pounds. Here we are. Which as you can tell is not very much at all. Now we're going to go ahead and we're going to bring this the next step, which would be an extra 60 degrees.

Okay, so now we're going to take this. So the line matches up with our 60 degrees there, which apparently is super tight. I've never seen. Yeah, it looks good. All right. So 60 degrees. We'll do the same to the top one. Let's get our caliper on here now. Should just slide right over the pads right into the bracket. That feels nice, very nice. I'm going to take my 7 millimeter Allen head. Just going to see if I can get it started in here. If it feels like it's getting tight prematurely, it's probably cross-threading in. So use your best judgment. It feels like both of these are started in at this point. I'm just going to go ahead and snug that. Move here. I'm going to do the same thing to this one. Tight, tight. Let's move along.

We've got our little covers. We'll just make sure we put those back over this. They're easy to forget. Okay. So we've got our little clip here. There's our little piton. It's going to go inside there. Okay. This area right here, it's going to go right underneath and right underneath there. Let's start with whichever side you want. Get your center lined up, and then just bring this down. Slide it in there. It's going to mess with you a little bit. You definitely want to make sure that your piton goes in through here and just give this a little shake like that. I can see it coming right through right there. That looks good. This is underneath here where it's supposed to be, and that's where it's supposed to be. Awesome. Let's move along.

All right, so now that we got this all together, all we have to do now is just pump up the brakes and onto the next step. Okay, so now to make it easier to get the wheel up on here where we don't have the lug studs that are sticking out and you put your wheel up on and just kind of holds the wheel nice and easy for you, you don't have to stand there and hold it forever, Volvo decided to make it fun and interesting and make it, work your muscles a little bit.

Well, 1A Auto sells this awesome tool. Basically all these are is they're going to give you a lug stud. So when you're putting your wheel on, you just slide your wheel right over this and it's going to kind of hold it there, so you don't have to sit there and try to muscle it the whole time while you try to line up the holes and put your lug stud in or lug bolt. I'm going to set that aside. I'm going to grab my wheel, bring it right over. Hold on to one of my lug nuts. I'm just going to bring this up. Slide it right over that. Boy oh boy, that made it easy.

Now we just take our lug bolt, put our wheel up against there. Start this in, hopefully I should have grabbed one of my sockets. It would have made my life a little easier here. Here we are. Even though I was holding the wheel steady that whole time, I didn't have to have my whole body holding it, try to line it up while I'm staring into the hole and put this through. Thank you 1A Auto. We'll just start all these lug nuts in and then we'll bottom them out, torque them down.

Okay. We've got all the lug nuts bottomed out. Now we'll just bring the vehicle back down so the wheel's touching the ground, but without the full force of the vehicle's weight on the wheel. And then we'll torque down these lug nuts.

Here we are friends. We've got our torque wrench out. It's set to 103 foot-pounds. I have my thin wall, 19 millimeter socket, because there's limited space to get in between these lug bolts and the wheel. When we tighten these down, we're going to go on a star pattern, here, here, here, here, here. Then if we decide to go around again, we'll do the same thing.

Anyway. The reason for going in a star is essentially so as we're going around, if the wheel's cantered a little bit, it won't get stuck that way and maybe the torque wrench thinks it's torquing it down to 103 like it's supposed to be, but it's a little bit cocked off to the side. Then you drive it down the road, hit a bump or whatever, everything starts loosening up. Your lug bolts come out. Long story short, just tighten them in a star pattern. There we are. I always like to go around twice. It doesn't cost me anything. It doesn't hurt me any. It's a small price to pay for safety. Okay, all torqued up. Great job everybody.

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