Now - this is probably a good place to mention that if you're replacing your axle seals as a preventative maintenance - and they weren't leaking - you may not need to do any of this. But, if your axle seals were leaking, and allowed diff oil into the axle bearing (and brake drums) - then you need to replace your bearing and drums as well. Diff oil in the bearing will "wash out" the bearing grease that keeps things moving smoothly, and will keep your brakes from working well - so it's a good idea to replace everything at the same time.

The first step is to use the 20-ton shop press and Rear Wheel Axle Bearing Puller & Tone Ring Tool/Installer SST to remove the ABS tone ring and inner retainer from the axle. And to use the SST, I had to pound out one of the studs that holds the backing plate to the axle housing. Using a nut to protect the threads and my trusty hammer, I was soon ready to go.


With the stud removed (from the assembly, not from me), I slid the red plate of the SST under the ABS tone ring and secured the puller over the axle with supplied washers and nuts and then put the entire assembly into the press. So far, so good.


As I started to press, I thought two things to myself. First - the design and build quality of the shop press is pretty "meh." I mean, it's Harbor Freight, and it seemed to work - if clumsily - for the entire project, but it is not a finely tuned machine. If I had more uses for it, I'd strongly consider a more expensive machine with a little better fit-and-finish. Second - I marvelled at the design and build quality of the Rear Wheel Axle Bearing Puller & Tone Ring Tool. This thing is awesome. Through the entire project, it couldn't have been more perfect - making all of the pulling and pressing operations simple - and safe. If you're doing this job and are considering making do with your own fixtures, my recommendation would be to do yourself a favor and pick one of these up. The time and frustration saved are worth it alone, even if you don't care about safety.

Pretty soon, I had the axle pressed out of the ABS tone ring and inner retainer. And, it's easy to see here where the axle seal rides on the inner retainer.


The next press operation was to remove the axle from the bearing and outer retainer, and to do that I had to draw the stud I'd removed from the backing plate back into place - an easy process with the washers supplied in the puller SST and a 14mm nut.


Oh, and I had to remove the snap ring that holds the bearing and retainer in place. I was prepared for this to take a bit of doing given how long other snap rings have taken to remove, but this time I guess I got lucky - it came right off, easy peasy.


With the snap ring removed, I could secure the Rear Wheel Axle Bearing Puller to the backing plate with its heavy duty washers and nuts, and move back over to the press. This time, as I pressed the axle down through the SST, the bearing and outer retainer would be captured, leaving the axle bare at the end of the operation.


Boy! The bang when the axle bearing released was - how should I say this - a "pants changer." It was loud, the entire press shaking as the energy was released. But, everything worked as it should, and as I removed the SST from the backing plate, there was the outer retainer - clean as a whistle, and with no "wear line" like the inner retainer - since no seal rides on it.


The fact that there is no wear line on the outer retainer is what allows us to save that $150 that I mentioned at the beginning of the post - we can simply swap the positions of the retainers on installation, and have a nice clean surface for our new axle seal to ride on. But more on that later...

I had to more bits to remove at this point before I was ready to start re-installation. First up was the outer dust shield, which just pulled right off with a pair of pliers. With the dust shield out of the way, I could use the Bearing Driver that came with the same Rear Wheel Axle Bearing Puller & Tone Ring Tool SST (how awesome is that?) to knock the wheel bearing out of the brake backing plate and onto the workbench.


At this point, I think it was mid-afternoon. It'd taken me a good 4 hours or so to get this far. I'd blame it on photos, but the reality is that I was just being really careful to double check myself at every step, since this was the first time I'd done this. As Eric at @Relentless Fab said to one of his guys when I was there - "Slower is faster." Truer words were never spoken .:thumbsup: