Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark_BC
So I finally looked in my ABS port and saw this on the left side. This is after the truck not moving for 3 weeks. The right side is dry(er).
I don't have the parts yet and won't be able to get them in time before I go over to my mom's house where the press is, unless I get ripped off by the local stealership. So my question is:
1) how long can I let this go until it blows out into the brakes or the bearing fries? I am just using it for kicking around town for now while back in town, plus I go to my mom's house which is 100 km away. I was thinking of doing a trip of maybe 500 miles next week. If it blows I can still limp home right? Just bring some extra diff oil.
2) maybe I can just replace the seal for now and get a bit more life out of it until I do the whole job? |
You can drive for quite a while with it leaking and be ok. I guess it depends how long gear oil has been surrounding your bearing on that bad side. The gear oil works it's way into your bearing and slowly washes out the grease. Once enough grease washes out and you go for a long drive at highway speeds, the bearing can overheat and fail in a very dramatic way destroying your axle and also gouging the inside of your axle housing. A guy who drove around 3 hours to my last party had this failure. I guess he had ignored the rear axle seal problem for a long time.
If you really want to do this 500 mile trip, I'd make sure the gear oil hasn't made into your brakes yet at the very least. If your brakes have been affected, you're braking power will be diminished and your brakes will actually pull towards the non-affected side.
The gear oil in your picture looks pretty clean and hasn't mixed with the bearing grease so I'm guessing you're probably ok. You just don't want to ignore this issue for a long time. At some point, your bearing will fail.
