Wheel Bearings - loud sound after hitting pothole at highway speed

You could be right. It is always a good idea to change hubs in pairs, partially because the characteristic rumbling is hard to pinpoint left or right especially if both are close to equally worn.

Another common issue is very early failure of low cost hubs. Timken or OEM are best.

Any decent shop can do wheel bearing hubs. Shop around. These are for my v wagon rear.

 

I fall in the other camp: replace whatever bearing fails and call it a day. In the eight years I owned my Gen 1, there were two bearings I had to replace, a right rear and a left front, and they went out years and tens of thousands of miles apart.

Sure, they're the same age and have the same miles and presumably around the same mean time to failure ... but when the distribution of times to failure is so wide and flat, the MTTF doesn't act like some kind of cliff; you don't have to assume one is going to conk out next week because one did this week.

A lot of things could happen to you or your car in the years or tens of thousands of miles that might pass between one bearing and the next one going.

But that's just my approach.

And yeah, that puts an extra premium on being sure which bearing is making the noise. A tool called a ChassisEar (or a local shop that has such a tool) can make really short work of that.

 

I like the thought of only replacing bad parts.

There's a long history of people replacing the wrong wheel bearing because those bearings are demented ventriloquists, frequently tricking mechanics into thinking the sound is coming from one corner and not another. You pays your money and you takes your chances. Spin again.

The chassis ears as mentioned above are absolutely The Right Tool for that job, but not every shop has them or the experience to use them confidently. Worth shopping around.

Good luck!

 

Have the tires been ruled out? You cream a pothole in the right way and sometimes there could be internal tire damage that can lead to a similar sound as bad bearings.

Did you hit the pothole with the left or right side of the car? If you hit it with the left and that wheel bearing is already new replacing the right would be stupid. It's possible it's the left rear as well. Really needs a better diag to figure that out prior to throwing parts at it.

 

I bought cheapo copies I don't remember the brand they weren't terrible but they were cheap and I've put $30,000 on them with no problem relatively quick to change and all that I have an extra set of aluminum arms for the front so I just change them out and then put the whole arm on generally faster for me to do that

SM-A715F ?

 

I would have stopped at $15k

 

30K miles not dollars

SM-A715F ?