2015 Lincoln MKC Front Wheel Bearing Replacement

This isn't something I usually write about but in this particular instance I would like to get down in words the supposedly simple task of replacing a front wheel bearing that went south in a spectacular way. Over the past several weeks/months I've noticed a noise coming from the front of the Lincoln that has every indication of worn front wheel bearings. Ok, now it's time to see how much of a job this is, so I visit YouTube to see how everyone does it. They make it look so easy. Off to the Jungle website to find replacement bearings and a nifty bearing puller/installer setup so I can do the job on the car. Mistake number one, don't buy wheel bearings from Amazon, but more on that later.

I started on the driver's side, no particular reason why. After removing the wheel/tire, the first order of business is to remove the brake caliper and hang it up and out of the way. Next is the axle nut. It's tight. Very tight. A pipe on a couple wheel studs and a 24" breaker bar on the nut is what it took to remove it. The rotor can also come off now, along with the dust shield on the back side of the rotor.

Once the axle nut was off, I attempted to push the axle out of the splined hub, like many of the videos showed. Nope, it wouldn't budge. No biggie, I'll put the nut back on the axle and give the end a few light whacks with a small sledge hammer, like some of the videos showed. Except..... after several increasingly heavy blows to the nut, I noticed the nut was sitting ever so slightly crooked on the axle. Mistake number two, don't whack on the end of a threaded axle shaft, even if it has a nut on it. Yep, a couple of threads on the axle got messed up. Out comes the large gear puller to get the axle shaft loose from the hub. Later in the process I had to use a file to repair the damaged threads. Fortunately they were at the end of the shaft, so the damage wasn't an issue.

Several of the videos I watched show a slide hammer and hub adapter are the go-to tools for getting the wheel hub out of the bearing. My slide hammer hub adapter's stud holes were too wide to fit the bolt pattern so I had to mill the slots closer to the center of the adapter. Sort of mistake number three, which I'll explain in the next photo after this one.

The adapter is installed in the photo below. I used three lug nuts to hold the adapter on. Problem is (mistake #2), the lug nuts are encased in thin decorative polished stainless steel caps. During the course of the slide hammer operation, the decorative caps got distorted from the sloped sides of the hub adapter such that the caps no longer stayed put on the lug nuts. I only found this out after I got the hub off the car. I now have three lug nuts with caps and two without, so I need a different size socket for the two sizes. Maybe I just need to break down and buy some new lug nuts...

This next photo shows the game plan. Ten or twenty nice blows with the slide hammer weight (according to YouTube videos) and the wheel hub should just pop right out of the bearing. Um, no.

And after a good hour (no exaggeration) of wailing away with the slide hammer and judicious use of a couple cold chisel wedges on the back side of the wheel hub, the hub finally separated from the car. My arms and shoulders may never be the same. Oh, and notice the little doohickey on top of the knuckle with a wire going to it? It's the wheel sensor that goes through the hub and sits next to the tone ring on the bearing (more on that later). I had to remove that sensor so it wouldn't get damaged during the bearing swap.

Houston, we have a problem. Yep, in my zeal to get the hub off, I managed to break the hub adapter. Fortunately it broke near the end of the ordeal. Now what do I do if I want to replace the passenger side bearing?

The photo below shows the adapter setup for pressing the bearing out of the steering knuckle. The bearing will be pushed to the left, into the press adapter's large cylinder.

This next photo shows the bearing out of the knuckle. The bearing puller kit I bought has varying sizes of adapter pucks and sleeves to deal with most any size bearing. The kit was $65 shipped, and it worked flawlessly. I'll use the same kit to install the new bearing and press the hub back into the bearing.

And here's the knuckle ready for a new bearing.

Removing this type of hub always destroys the bearing, as it pulls out an inner race and dust shield from the wheel bearing. No getting around it. If you have to remove one of these sealed wheel bearings, do not ever plan on reusing it. You'll need to put in a new bearing. The photo below shows a diagonal cut I put in the inner race so I could use a cold chisel and crack the race and get it off the hub.

Here's where I need to tell a little story. Once upon a time....... I bought what I thought was a set of two bearings on Amazon. The Amazon listing clearly showed two bearings in the photo and nowhere in the description did it say only one was being sold. A cryptic note said "fits left or right side". I should have known. Only one bearing showed up at the door. Great. So off to Amazon again and this time I ordered a set of two. I knew this because it said "X2" in the description, in addition to a photo of two bearings.

I sucked a new bearing into the knuckle with the bearing puller/installer. One thing I failed to mention previously is that the lower ball joint needs to be separated from the knuckle so the axle can be pulled from the knuckle so that the bearing can then be pressed out/in.

This next photo below shows the ball joint going back in. I pried down the lower control arm with a long pry bar and used a ratchet strap to pull the knuckle into position. It took a fair amount of my weight leaning on the pry bar to get the lower control arm down far enough, while lining up the knuckle hole and ball joint pin with one hand and working the ratchet strap with the other. Um, is that the drive shaft still hanging at the top of the photo below? Why yes, yes it is. And doesn't that drive shaft need to be positioned in the new bearing before the knuckle gets put back onto the ball joint? Why yes, yes it does. And by the way, this isn't the first time I had to take the ball joint/knuckle joint apart because of this overlooked step. I did get pretty good at ball joint pin removal/installation by the time the job was done.

I had to get creative with the ratchet strap because its short end was a little too long and there wasn't much in the way of anchor selection for the hooks. I managed to get it to work.

If you look closely at the retaining ring in this next photo below, you can see peeled-off pieces of magnet (the encoder or tone ring, not sure what to call it). That's not good, but it didn't look like a show-stopper. The silver peg in the lower right portion of the photo is the ball joint stub/pin that fits into the bottom of the steering knuckle. I had that joint apart way too many times.

While the tone ring didn't look too bad in the above photo, by the time I got done with the first test drive, it looked like this (below). Yeah, that's not good at all. The test drive went horribly. A bunch of warning lights lit up the dash. ABS, hill-holding start, traction control, and one or two more I can't remember. Something was terribly wrong. And the wheel bearing was a noisy mess.

I figured I'd done something wrong during the installation process, and I was glad I still had two good Amazon bearings to finish the project. Since I didn't have a slide hammer adapter to get the hub out of the damaged bearing, I decided to make a hub puller that would work better than the hokey slide hammer fiasco. And boy, did it work well.

At this point I put in a second new Amazon bearing and put the car all back together once again. I took the car for a second test drive and I had the exact same issues as the first test drive. The dash lit up like a Christmas tree, the bearing made a horrible noise, and the tone ring was chewed up. Ok, maybe Amazon isn't the place to buy wheel bearings. My next stop was Napa.

Oh, I need to point this out also. See in the below photo, there's a large retaining ring (snap ring). Yeah, it's on the back side of the knuckle. How convenient is that? Not very. All the YouTube videos I watched on Ford vehicles showed the retaining ring on the outside of the knuckle. Lincoln is made by Ford so you'd think that they'd all be the same. Yeah, no. This wheel bearing also fits Ford Focus, Escape, Transit, and C-Max. I bet all their retaining rings are on the outside of the steering knuckle.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, the new Napa bearing worked great. No errant dash lights and no more wheel bearing noises occurred on the third test drive, I'm not sure why I didn't hear a passenger side bearing noise at this point - was it just a noisy driver's side bearing the whole time? I might replace the passenger side bearing at some point. It took three days for this disaster of a project. The below photo shows maybe 2/3 of of the tools I had to use in this endeavor. To recap, I removed the original bearing, installed and removed two horrible-quality Amazon bearings, and installed one Napa bearing. I can almost do this job in my sleep now.