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TR4/4A Leaking ft hub seals

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H

HAWAIICJ

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I did a mechanical restoration of my fathers TR and it has turned out awesome to drive with one issue. The brakes have not been performing as I expected. The whole brake system has been replaced from lines, hoses, master and slave cylinders (calipers and wheel cyls). Usually when driving at speed you can stand this car on its nose when applying the brakes and lock up the wheels. I could not figure out the performance issue and saturday I discovered that the inboard brake pads on both ft calipers were soaked in liquefied wheel bearing grease. I had installed a trimmed version of the felt seals when I initially installed the hubs and rotors and found the grease leaked down the backing plate so I replaced them with the non trimmed felt seals only now finding that they are also leaking, only the rotor has been coated and no grease has reached the inside of the wheels as yet.

My question to you all is have you seen or used a rubber lip seal in place of the felt oe type felt seals? The grease I am using is a typical modern high temp red disc bearing grease.
 
I may have too much grease installed into the hub. I am using the reinforced spindle kit with the shims and spacer installed so there is less room for grease to expand and occupy.

I am looking into the seal alternatives and so far the ID of the seals appears wrong. I'm measuring the ID as 1.325" or 35mm with a depth of 0.25" or 6mm depth. I currently don't have a loose ft wheel hub handy to measure the seal OD.

Does anyone have a hub out to measure the seal OD?

Thanks
 
Folks,

FYI - Last year I replaced the front bearings on my TR4a. I went to the Timken website and found these parts:

Inner bearing - 07100s
Inner race - 07210x
Outer bearing - 03062
Outer race - 03162

They also listed an inner seal, part 480991, as mentioned above.

Rockauto had the same part numbers listed, and listed the seal as well. Rockauto also showed the same seal picture as Timken did, which didnt look anything like the original felt seal. It looked like a modern seal in that it appeared to have a metal casing, and the seal itself looked like it was nitrile or something similar, not felt at all. As it was only $3.50 I decided to get one just to check it out. Well the seal was completely wrong!
First, the outer diameter of the metal case was slightly too small for the hub, so it wouldnt seat. The nitrile ring was slightly too wide, so it wouldnt seal against the axle. Finally, the metal case was actually taller than the original felt seal, so it wouldnt have let the hub fit all the way into the hub (even if it had, there would have been metal to metal contact with the back face of the axle mount).

Jim
 
I ordered a set of the felt seals and am going to inspect and clean the bearings, reduce the volume of grease and install the felt seals. It is easier to do this than look for a seal that might be difficult to find when another is needed.

FYI the dimensions I have are 53MM OD - 35MM ID - 5MM Depth.

Looking through SKF and National catalogs there are seals that are close with imperial dimensions but the OD is the one dimension that seems difficult to find.
 
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