Why Does My Wheel Wobble Bad Bearing

Hey, friends. It's Len here from 1A Auto. Today, we're gonna be working on our 2011 Mercedes E-350, and I gotta tell you, we've been driving this puppy around. We love it, but recently we started hearing a little bit a noise. It started off with some scraping. A little bit of a rubbing noise. All of a sudden you hit a bump and you start hearing, "Bonk, bonk, bonk." What's this going on? So what we did. We put it up on the lift, and we want to check it out.

We're gonna start at the right rear because this is where it sounded like the noise came from. We'll give it a try. Oh, well, I think we're gonna have to check it out a little bit better. Well, as always, if you need any parts check us out, 1aauto.com. Let's get started. All right, so first thing we're gonna do is take off our lugnuts with our 17 millimeter.� 

So one thing we're gonna notice is that there's significant damage to the rotor. We have a rub mark going across all the way right here, all along here, and on the inside right here, okay? So that means this has been rubbing. If you look along here you can see right here. Yep, all along here I've got metal shavings, okay? It's all very bad. Inside the caliper, you'll notice that right along here has a lot of rub marks and a little bit right here. And the reason for all that just like I suspected the wheel bearing.

You can see it separated right inside there, okay? Right down along right in here. That's really bad. This needs to be replaced. So in our case, we found the problem, right? We have a bad wheel bearing, which in turn is making it so this rotor can wobble around like this. It's hitting up against the inside of the caliper and up against the backing plate, along with the emergency brake shoes.

So what we need to do is we need to correct the issue with a brand new wheel bearing. We're gonna get some emergency brake shoes, new brakes. We'll just do new pads and rotors. The caliper looked like it should be reusable. For your circumstance, whether yours is the same as this or it might be a little bit different I couldn't tell you, but this is what we found for this particular vehicle.

All right, so we pulled the bearing out of the car. Just want to show you what's going on. Our bearing has quite a bit of movement, all right? Maybe your bearing has movement like ours does, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're like, "Oh, mine doesn't have movement. It can't be bad." There's other things that could be bad. Maybe you spin the wheel and you hear a growling noise. If I give this a spin you can definitely hear that it's no good.

Now imagine with the weight of the vehicle and the wheel pressing on this it's gonna make a lot more noise. Generally speaking, what happens is the grease that's inside melts out of there or just goes away essentially. And you'll have metal on metal, and that'll cause that grinding and metallic gross noise that nobody likes to hear when they're driving down the road. So now you know what our problem is, and you can go ahead and diagnose your own.

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