I was wrong!

This car (1987 300d) has had a bad right rear wheel bearing since I got it a couple weeks ago. Was noisy, and wheel had lots of free play if you jacked it up. So, today I thought I'd swap it out over a long lunch at my fabrication shop so I no longer had to worry about the wheel falling off.

The first interesting thing was I didn't need a ratchet or breaker bar to remove the hub nut after unstaking it. I simply spun it off with the 30mm socket by hand. I welded together a quick and ugly adapter to bolt a slide hammer to the hub and proceeded to aggravate my carpal tunnel by pounding away on the hub. It moved out about 1/8 inch and stopped. After way to much slide hammering, I added weight to the slide. Banged away another half hour, no luck. I finally resorted to a slide weight that was a block of steel 6" diameter 4" long and 4 good wacks yanked the hub out of the bearing. Here is what I found after a quick bead blast:


As you can see, the inner race spun big time on the hub. This raised a lip on each side of the groove that created the interference fit that didn't want to let go. So, since I didn't have a spare hub, and am a welding & machining kind of guy I decided to fix the hub. First I built it up via TIG welding - which was really shaky with a hand that was numbed by the carpal tunnel aggravation the slide hammer caused:


Then it was turned back true on the lathe:


And after a little polishing back to the original diameter:


I heated the bearing and iced the hub, and they went together with a beautiful, tight fit. The reassembly was quick and easy...

So my 2 hour plan stretched out to about 5! But it's done, the howling is gone, and I'm not worried about losing the wheel any more...