Yes, fun to read, but seriously if you're the dial indicator kind of person use it and be happy...if you're not you can surely do the job just fine without it. I've packed bearings for 25 years on MB's and others never used a dial indicator and never had a problem. The MB tolerance is very tight but, like many things this is optimal and not realistic of real world conditions.

It reminds me of a show on the discovery channel last night about the construction of a new football stadium in Houston. One of the engineering specs for the "trueness" of the crain rail which supports the sliding roof was +/- 1 degree or 1/16". After they installed it it was off by 0.6 degrees or 1/27". They spent three weeks tweeking the roof structure and after 3 weeks it was still off by 0.6 degrees. The engineers finally accepted it and said it was OK. Yes, it is OK to be off by the thickness of a credit card when building a rail to support the roof of a football stadium. Do you really need an engineer to tell you that? Well, yes, because it was the engineer who specified 1 degree in the first place. How did they come up with that? Well, "it's small and a nice round number" is probably how. 5 Degrees is probably too much so they went with 1...can't hurt to try and build it like that but in reality they wasted 3 weeks labor trying to resolve something that was not a problem.

Just like the .0002" tolerance on wheel bearing end play...not a problem and in reality it will be fine to a much wider range, but engineers try for perfection. It's the mechanics that live in the real world that is far from perfect.

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Marty D.

2013 C300 4Matic
1984 BMW 733i
2013 Lincoln MKz