Joined: 15 Jun 2008
Posts: 1391
Location: UK
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Tools you may find useful:
- Grips (to grip the bolt whilst tightening the nut)
- Spanner (to tighten the nut)
- Clamp/vice (for holding on to the bolt if you can't grip or haven't got enough hands - but don't clamp the wheel tight as it can damage it)
- Claw-hammer (to hook on and pull on the washer - not always needed if you are strong/can grip it by hand)
OK, I use something we call a "Sleeve Anchor" - they're cheap little nut+bolt gizmo's usually used to fix heavy objects (like AC compressors) to walls. Here we can get them in most good hardware/DIY stores, and hopefully you guys should be able to find them in yours too.
What they are is a sleeve with a bolt in the middle, but the bolt gets wider towards the far end, and when you tighten the nut at the protruding end, this makes the other end of the sleeve expand and fill the hole, or in this case, it makes it grip the inside of the bearing, so you can easily pull it out. If you don't have much physical hand-strength, you may need to put your feet on the sides of the mega, and pull the bolt up with the claw-side of a hammer or some grips, or you could put the protruding end of the bolt in a vice/clamp and simply "pull" the wheel smoothly off of the now fixed bearing, but as long as the sleeve anchor is firmly fixed into the centre of the bearing (by means of tightening the nut) it'll definitely come out once you've got the knack.
You could put a little bit of tape around the sleeve anchor to mark the depth right for "just" gripping the bearing if you like, but it really doesn't matter if you pull out the central spacer too (the silver thing between the bearings) as it goes back in easy enough.
Here's a pic of the sleeve anchor shown next to a standard ABEC-5 608 mega-wheel bearing, to give you an idea of the size you need:
Sleeve anchors often come in much larger sizes, so you need to find one that will fit into the center of your bearing, but not one that is so small that it won't grip - easiest way is to take the wheel to the store with you and find one that fits - my Sleeve Anchor's are for 6.5mm diameter holes (the inside of a standard 608 bearing usually has an "M-8" or 8mm bore, or so I am told)
I'm including all these pics just so you know what you're looking for at the store, in case they have a different name in the US etc (as things often do)
Now, if you add an extra-large washer to your sleeve-anchor, you have *Tada* - Merrie's secret weapon against stubborn/stuck bearings, shown here dissassembled:
With this little baby I can pull out any bearing in seconds with my bare hands - no need for any other tools
Oh, and here's a crappy vid I made, just to try to show how I mean when I say you can use ordinary sleeve-anchors to fix them to the inside of the bearing for easy pulling/removal
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q1uJ-FvLVY
Again, sorry for the crap blurry vid - only got an old mobile phone for taking vids.
Hope this helps
You can actually buy a "bearing press and removal" machine which will proffesionally remove bearings etc, but the cheapest one I've seen is about 30 bucks, and my home-made method above cost me only about 90 cents |
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"The best part of falling is getting back up again" |
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