Greasing your sealed front hubs
 

You know on the more modern trucks they have unitized hubs on them? The hubs only have dust seals in them and enough grease to keep them running for a while but its set up to fail. Well, people think you cant pack them. Wrong. You can go to NAPA and buy their chrome air blower with the rubber tip. All you really want is the tip. Unscrew it and put an 1/8" pipe coupler on it. Take the grease fitting off of your grease gun (hand pump grease gun not air) and thread the coupler/tip on to it. Now take your vehicle apart and pull the ABS sensor. Use Kendall Super Blue 427 grease. That looks like what is in every bearing I have taken apart. Dont mix another grease. When you get the sensor out, put the rubber tip in the sensor hole and start pumping. Now you have a seal on the inside and outside. that you need to watch for grease. Pump until you just see like a sweat coming out of the dust seal, not oozing out mind you, and stop pumping. You have to keep looking at both seals because one will let it out sooner than the other. As a rule of thumb, a 1500 takes about 32 to 36 pumps on an average, a 2500 takes anywhere from 65 to 80 pumps. Once you see the grease at the seals, Remove the rubber tip from the abs hole, rotate the hub one revolution and let the hub push out some grease thru the sensor hole. Now take a screwdriver and go in the hole, angle it so its going against the direction of rotation, till you hit the commutator inside. When you feel it, lift the screw driver up a little and rotate the hub so more grease comes up the screwdriver. Now finish cleaning the sensor hole by pulling as much grease out as you can and install the sensor. You have just packed your sealed hub. This works with any vehicle that has the abs sensor in the hub and any make. You can see pics of the proceedure here http://courtsara.com/tips.html You can enlarge the pictures to get a good view of what you need to see. The test subject is a chev 1500 but it makes no difference. I have done ford, dodge, and chevy in this way. Another good grease is the Delo ep sgli#2 grease. All the hubs I have taken apart appeared to have either Delo or Kendall grease in them.

Thanks for the info.

Awesome info, great 2nd post!

I hope you are not filling the hub with grease. It would not be able to expand if so.
We know many hubs are almost dry when new, so I would suggest half of what you are suggesting.

You are actually filling it but when you rotate it one time without the screwdriver it pushes a bunch out the abs hole. When you slip the screwdriver down inside and get more out by rotating it again you are creating an air void right where the commutator is and that gives room for expansion. I have been experimenting recently with putting 28 pumps of grease and you dont even have to watch the seals on the 1500. I work on hundreds of these trucks at work that run in a mining atmosphere through all kinds of mud and water so I get to experiment a lot. Two years ago we spent 120k on hubs out there. Last year we spent 5% of that. There is always room to fine tune but I can tell you this works. I have 150k on my duramax 2500 with the original hubs and they are showing no sign of failing. I have done my friends Dodges and Fords and they are happy too. There is some grease that comes past the seal but its like a residue that catches dust or dirt. I'll put up with that anyday rather than spend the 300 to 500 on a new hub and the lousey things last 30 or 40k miles if you use your truck like I do. I have seen failures at work with 4000 miles on them. These same trucks are going 100k on the original hubs. I have tested this over and over. You be the judge. By the way, I put an infrared on my hubs when I first did them. They ran at 107 degrees before the greasing and went to 119 after and that was with a 95 degree ambient temperature.

Are you saying they got warmer with the grease in them?

Yes they got warmer. A whole 12 degrees. When the grease molecules rub against one another it creates friction and heat but the two greases I specify are in the 400 degree range before breakdown. I wanted to add that if any of you guys are building a mud truck with 1 and 2 ton axles or bigger you need to check out some of the other things I am doing. On the old style front ends I can pack your hub bearings and your axle shaft bushing or bearing without taking it apart. This is all on my site.

I saw something on the 2nd gen forum within the past couple of days about using a syringe to drip some Amsoil 75w90 in through the same place.

Couldn't find the thread to reference here...

Has anyone tried it on a 3rd gen?

Here is the number for the rubber nipple from NAPA that I use. 90-583

i filled mine with motorkote.

I just got Dynatracs. I don't go through much water down here and wanted to shutdown all that needless rotational mass.

Motorkote is not grease. Use either IXL 710 or Kendall 427. As of now I think the IXL is better with 50000 miles between services as compared to 30000. You can experiment all you want but if I were you I would use something that is tried and true. There might be a better grease out there but from what I saw on your hyperlink, motorkote is just a spray lube like wd40 and the like.

Been using motorkote for years you medd to do a little more research. Not using the spray for that using uncut motorkote that I use in all my fluids. I let the motorkote soak in and penetrate then I add green grease from my grease gun. Get you some motorkote you won't regret it. Www.motorkote.com

does not work on my '01

Hub grease
 

I'm intrigued by this and it makes a helluva lot of sense.
My concern is mixing greases with different bases. I looked up the spec.s on the Delo Greaser1 mentioned and I found a Valvoline product at Napa that has the same specs.
Valvoline SYNpower Full Synthetic NLGI #2 GC-LB Complex Lithium EP Grease
I have an '03 Ram 2500 and I'm putting new bearings in from Napa. Anyone else go this route of adding grease to there hub bearings? I think I'm on the right track as long as the replacement Napa bearings have the same grease in them from the manufacturer.
I tried to smoke out Greaser1 via PM but no luck. He's probably busy as hell keeping stuff running.
Any input greatly appreciated. Greaser1.... Are you out there?