2001 Toyota Solara L4 2.2L with 4 Wheel ABS Brakes Front & Rear 4 Piece Wheel Bearing & Hub Kit TRQ BHA65736

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Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out, and next time you need parts for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

In this video, we're going to show you how to remove and replace the wheel bearing and hub. If you like this video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this car as well as many other makes and models. You can follow the link down in the description over to 1AAuto.com. Here are the items you'll need for this repair.

Break all of your lug nuts loose while the vehicle is still on the ground. You're going to need a 21mm socket and a breaker bar. Install your jack under the vehicle. Line it up with the pinch weld. Jack the vehicle up high enough that you can get a stand underneath, making sure you have enough clearance to remove your tire or do whatever you have to do under the vehicle.

Install your jack stand onto this unibody frame rail under the vehicle. With the vehicle raised and supported, remove your lug nuts the rest of the way. If you need a little more room to work, you can pull the hub cap off, remove your wheel from the hub. We've put our vehicle on a lift to make it easier to film for you, but this job can be easily done with a jack and jack stands.

Remove the cotter pin from the end of the CV axle. You have to straighten it out. Grab the end and work it out of the axle. Remove the lock cap. Insert a pry bar between the wheel studs. I'm bracing mine against the lift, but you can brace yours against the ground on the jack and jack stands when you use the 30 millimeter axle socket and a cheater pipe on a breaker bar to break the axle not loose. Once the axle nut is cracked loose, you can remove it almost fully.

We'll leave our pry bar there for when it gets a little tight on the threads, to make sure that it doesn't spin. Place a punch in the center hole of the axle, and tap it to release it from the splines. Remove the 12mm bolt, securing the brake line and ABS sensor wire in, with a 12mm socket ratchet and extension. Remove the hose from the ABS sensor from the retainer. Remove the two 17mm caliper bracket bolts with a socket and ratchet.

Be sure to break both bolts lose before removing either one fully, otherwise the bracket has a tendency to move and become more difficult to get out of the vehicle. Once both bolts are removed, we'll remove the brake caliper and carrier assembly from the rotor and using a bungee cord, mechanics wire, zip tie, or whatever you have that's strong enough to secure this. We’ll hang it up out of our way.

Remove the brake rotor from the hub. Remove the cotter pin and the castle nut for our tie rod end. Simply straighten it out here with a pair of needle-nose pliers. Get it as straight as you can. Grab the other side and work it out. Using a 19mm socket and ratchet, we'll remove the nut from the tie rod end. We're going to hit the spindle, just below the joint, with a hammer to release the tie rod from the spindle. Now we'll remove the three 17mm bolts securing our lower ball joint onto the control arm.

You could remove the cotter pin and nut and release the ball joint from the bottom of the spindle, but it's not really going to be in our way. It's a lot easier to remove these bolts than that nut. Now we'll use a small pry bar to pry up on the ball joint and down on the control arm and release. Using a 10mm socket and ratchet, remove the bolt for the wheel speed sensor. Make sure you feel this one out when you're removing it, because these do tend to get a little stuck and you don't want to break it off from the spindle, so use penetrating oil if necessary.

Remove this retainer for the wheel speed sensor. We'll hang that out of the way so we can remove our two 22mm bolts for the strut with a socket, breaker bar, and a wrench. When removing the last bolt, be sure to support the spindle, because this is the last thing we have holding it into the car. We can now remove our spindle with our wheel bearing and hub assembly from the car.

You can see we have some serious metal shavings and rust and dirt build-up here inside of our bearing, but there is a snap ring right here that I'm trying to clean off so you can see a little better. It's not a traditional snap ring with the islets it has these two hooks here. You can see one's highlighted blue and the other one on the other side here. We'll pinch those together with a pair of needle-nose pliers and work them out so we can press our bearing and hub out of the spindle.

Because we have all this build-up and this isn't just rust. This is kind of gummy from grease being in there, and that's going to make it hard to remove our snap ring. We'll take the punch and gently tap around the edges on the snap ring to try to free up some of the rust and corrosion and make sure it comes out nice and smooth. You can see that this side is getting a little stuck when I collapse that snap ring. Sometimes if you turn it, it'll get it out of there and then we can remove it from our spindle.

We've put our hub into a vise. We’ll now install a hub puller onto the wheel studs and put three lug nuts on there. Tighten it down. You want to make sure it's in this vise nice and tight. This could be done on the vehicle but with the way the axle sits and everything else on the vehicle, it puts a lot less strain on the spindle to do it this way.

We'll install our slide hammer into the hub puller. Give it a couple of taps to make sure it's in the vice tight. We'll remove our spindle from the vice.

We'll set our puller into the vise so we can remove it from the hub. The inner race is very common to come off with the hub so it is possible to do a wheel bearing without doing the hub. If you remove this inner race, and we're going to show you how to do that now, but because of this issue with the inner wheel bearing race coming off on the hub it's nearly impossible to do a hub in one of these vehicles without doing a bearing. In case you're just changing your bearing and you don't want to do a hub with it, these next steps will show you how to remove that inner race and make this hub reusable.

We'll remove this puller. The easiest way to do this, or the safest way to do this, is to install two lug nuts on studs that are next to each other so we can install it into the vice like this and not worry about damaging anything as long as we clamp down on the flat parts. Using two is going to keep this hub in nice and solid while we work and prevent us from damaging our lugs or threads so we can be sure that this hub is going to work when we reinstall it.

What we'll do now, is the easiest way to do this at home. We're actually going to show you a few different methods on how to do this. One of the simpler ones is to get a nice sharp chisel. We're going to wedge it in between the bearing the back of the hub and hit it to try to lift it up and get it moving so we can either get a bearing puller underneath there or get it into a press or if necessary, if you don't have those tools, it can be worked all the way off using just a chisel.

If you have access to torches heating it up is going to be the easiest way to do it. Be sure the area you're working is well ventilated and that you move the heat all the way around this race so it expands evenly. You want to do your best not to heat the shaft of the hub at the same time because that will make it expand as well and kind of defeat the purpose of what we're trying to do. There's no need to get this glowing red as long as it's a little bit warm it's going to give us that extra clearance we need to remove the interference fit.

Be sure to use proper safety equipment when using a hammer and chisel. You want to work around this race evenly to try to bring it up and ensure that you don't let the chisel go in too deep as that will score it and make it difficult or prevent you from reinstalling into a new bearing. Got that one tap under there with the chisel.

Remove the four 10mm bolts to remove the dust shield from the spindle. Once the bolts are out just wiggle that dust shield right off the spindle. We're going to rotate our ball joint out of the way here and set it up in the press. We're going to install a bearing driver onto the top here and push the bearing out with our press. It's very important that the spindle is supported evenly.

Here we have our old wheel bearing and hub that we removed from our vehicle and our new wheel bearing and hub kit from 1AAuto.com. As you can see, the hubs themselves are exactly the same. We have the same splines on them there. We have the same bolts and bolt pattern. We have the same size shaft on the back that will install into our new bearing. It also comes with a new wheel bearing. It's hard to tell, but they are the same here, just because this inner race gets stuck on the actual hub when you remove it a lot of the time.

A bad hub being worn here, or a bad bearing, can cause a grinding noise or a vibration when the wheels are turning, or these hubs can become damaged, corroded, broken, or have bad splines in them that don't allow the CV axle to sit in correctly. This bearing presses up into the spindle from the back. It's retained with a snap ring. Then, the hub is pressed down into it from the front. If you have any issues like this with your vehicle, this new kit form 1A auto is going to go in direct fit just like your original equipment and fix you up right.

The first thing you're going to want to do before installing your new bearing is ensure that the bore of the spindle is clean and free of burrs or debris that are going to stop our bearing from going in or scar it on the way in.

Then, we'll get it set up in our press. There's a grooved edge here so we can just lay it flat. Make sure that it's on there nice and straight. We'll set our bearing into the bore. We're going to use an 81mm bearing installer here. It's just the right outside diameter. You don't want to push on this inner part here. You want to make sure you hit the edge. It's going to be just a little undersized so it'll go in and out of the hub easily. I need a little bit of a spacer here. I'll bring that bearing in until it bottoms out.

That block isn't going to make it all the way into the bore so we'll bring that up a little, put a spacer in here on top of our installer. Bring it the rest of the way up. You can see here that our bearing is pressed firmly against this bezel on the spindle and in the back our groove for the snap ring is wide open so we'll install that next.

Set our snap ring in. Put our needle nose pliers into the grooves and put it into the bore. We can set it down into the channel. We'll give it a few taps with a flat punch and a hammer to make sure that it's fully seated throughout the groove.

After installing the bearing into the hub we'll have to reinstall the backing plate for our front brakes and the four 10mm bolts.

We're going to use an 81mm bearing installer. We've propped our hub up onto four equal height blocks between the actual studs to make sure that we're laying flat on the hub, otherwise if you try to rest it on the studs often it will press them out of the actual hub and you'll have to hammer them all back in which is very time-consuming and risks damaging your new parts.

We did show you how to cut the inner race off of the old hub and you could reuse that if you only went in there to replace the bearing but we're going to change ours out with the new part from 1AAuto using the same installation procedure. We’ve got an 81mm spacer on the back of the bearing to make sure that it all stays together and that we push our hub in flush with the end. We'll press it in until it bottoms out. It's very important now that we make sure that everything goes in nice and straight and level because going in sideways could damage our bearing or make it nearly impossible to remove the hub. Once we've bottomed out, we'll release the pressure from our press. Remove our spindle and the installer and ensure that our new bearing rotates freely and smoothly.

Reinstall the spindle into the strut. We'll put the top 22mm bolt and nut in first, followed by the lower one. Now, you can tighten all of this as you go along, but just for the sake of making sure everything moves and goes back together smoothly, we're going to get everything lined up and finger tight before we torque down any of our hardware.Now that the strut is in, we'll swing it out a little, line up our CV axle. We'll send the axle into the hub. Put our axle nut on.

This is a new axle nut, because we removed our old one, and every time you install one of these, you want to use a new one. Just to hold that in place for now. We put a pry bar into one of the slots in the lower control arm, so we can pull down, push it in, and line up our lower ball joint back into its slots in the control arm. You may want to install the nuts first, because they're tapered. It will help draw it into place. Once we get that taper on the two nuts set in, the threads for our bolt in the top hole should line up nicely.

Reinstall the tie rod into the spindle, and the castle nut onto the tire rod. Tighten up our 22mm bolts on the bottom of the strut with a socket ratchet and wrench. Torque to 156 foot pounds. Tighten the tie rod nut with a 19mm socket and ratchet, torque to 36 foot pounds. Install your cotter pin. I like to trim one edge of mine down because you really only need one to lock it into place, and it makes it easier to remove them later. Bend up that bottom. That tie rod's in tight. Tighten the 17mm nuts and bolts on the bottom ball joint at the control arm, torque this hardware to 94 foot pounds. Reinstall the speed sensor into the spindle, as well as the 10mm bolt. We'll tighten that down with a socket and ratchet. We'll reinstall our rotor.

Now, one trick, especially where we just replaced our axle – so, we have our old axle nut -- it's a really cool trick. It makes it really easy to reinstall the caliper and bracket as an assembly when you haven't removed your brake pads. Go ahead and put that axle nut over the wheel stud closest to the brakes. Spin it in by hand, and that lug nut will sit in there nice and straight.

Now your rotor is on straight and tight so our pads will slide right over them. We won't have to worry about gravity kicking it out at the bottom. Remove your brake calipers from whatever you used to secure it. Make sure the flex hoes isn't twisted. We'll slide it back over the rotor. See how it goes on nice and easy there when that rotor's held on straight. We'll line up and reinstall our two 17mm bolts at the back. Tighten the caliper bolts down with a socket and ratchet. Torque these bolts to 79 foot-pounds. Go head and remove the lug nut and the axle nut, if you used them to secure that rotor.

Reinstall the ABS sensor retainers, both here at the strut, on the side, followed by the flex hose, with your 12mm bolt. We'll then tighten down with our socket, ratchet, and extension. Spin the axle nut on by hand, make sure it's fully seated. We'll reinstall our wheel and tire and put the weight of the vehicle back on.

Reinstall the wheel and tire, tighten down the nuts. Put the vehicle onto the ground, check that they're all seated. If you've removed a tire, only lower the vehicle until the wheel touches the ground. With partial weight of the vehicle on the ground, torque your lug nuts to 76 foot-pounds in a cross pattern, then you can remove your jack the rest of the way. Torque the axle nuts 217 foot-pounds. Reinstall the lock cap, make sure that it lines up in a way that we can put our cotter pin through. Always use a new cotter pin, bend the ears up and over the axle.

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