A friend of mine is trying to replace the front hub / wheel bearing assembly on his 1994 Mazda Miata. He is roughly following this procedure:

http://www.miata.net/garage/fronthub/index.html

He has most of the assembly off of the spindle. Unfortunately, the remainder of the assembly (what appears to be the outer race) came free from the assembly and remains on the spindle. He has tried twisting it off with various wrenches, and hammering a chisel into the gap between the two without success. He is looking for your thoughts.

3/20/2010 11:19:03 AM

The first thought would be to stop trying to hammer a chisel in there you just going to mess up the spindle if you haven't already. Without know what tools you have you could either heat up the race with a small propane torch and pull it off or take a small grinder and slowly cut the a slot in the race till it opens up and you can pull it off.



[Edited on March 20, 2010 at 1:58 PM. Reason : ]

3/20/2010 1:57:34 PM

correction: he says it is the inner race not the outer race (lol duh)

He's been considering going around it with a propane torch (and will probably try this next), but he fails to see how taking a grinder to it is preferable to beating at it with a chisel. Obviously it's not a chisel he cares too much for, and he's going to beat the spindle unrecognizable before he replaces it...

[Edited on March 20, 2010 at 4:20 PM. Reason : final answer]

3/20/2010 4:09:56 PM

I understood what you were talking about, I was saying use a grinding tool because you can cut the race without nicking the spindle.

3/20/2010 4:23:38 PM

i'd heat it up and try to get it to grow

3/20/2010 5:19:31 PM

So he tried heating & beating a bit, no love as of yet. He doesn't have a grinder handy so that's out for now. He's going to give heating it a more thorough try in a while when he works up the motivation.

After locating some similar discussions elsewhere he's starting to wonder about the effects of this heat cycling on the heat treatment of the spindle. In theory if he gets the spindle hot enough for a period of time it will anneal to some extent, should he be considering this when deciding whether or not to just replace the damn thing?

[Edited on March 20, 2010 at 5:59 PM. Reason : real post]

3/20/2010 5:58:58 PM

he probably won't get it hot enough to have an effect

i got a lower control arm to grow enough to press in a ball joint by just pointing a kerosene blower heater at it for a little while.

[Edited on March 20, 2010 at 6:06 PM. Reason : afds]

3/20/2010 6:05:12 PM

a can of compressed air turned upside down will blow freezing liquid out. You can always shrink what is inside as opposed to growing what is outside.

3/20/2010 7:14:05 PM

OR BOTH!!1!

3/20/2010 7:25:26 PM