AW11 Strut Top Bearing Replacement

[Duk]

This is 1 of those jobs I've bean meaning to do for ages, and I finally got off my arse and did 1 of them .

It's kind of hard to see, but there are 6 spot welds evenly spaced around the bearing carrier. In this high quality photo you should be able to see that I have put a white mark on each 1. After that they were centre punched.

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Spot welds drilled with a 7mm drill bit on a drill press. The combined thickness of the 3 pieces is nearly 10mm

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Typically there will be some spot weld left un-drilled, but brute force and ignorance wins the day (read: hammer and a dolly). Careful tho, as it's easy to tear the bearing retaining piece around the hole. I just opened it up far enough to get the old bearing out.

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[Duk]

The bearing of failure.

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Behold! The bearing of replacement. The new bearing is a deep grove ball bearing 40x15x13. Cost less than $7 each

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Use 6mm bolts,nuts and spring washers to hold it all together. A few things to bare in mind. The pieces of the strut tops are radiused and the bolts/nuts/washers will more than likely foul on them, so a grinder with a flap disk was used to relieve the bolt heads and washers to help them sit flat. Cap head bolts would be a lot easier

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Doneski.

[worldwalker]

Edit: Found the photos on the link.

[Duk]

WOW! This is an old thread!
These photos were on my old desk top that suffered from hard drive death, many years ago!

[worldwalker]

Good idea, saved me a few bucks and if the bearing blows its an hour job to replace it.