So what it really comes down to is my fear of hitting things too hard to avoid any possibility of damage.
I couldn’t remove the stub axle yesterday since I was being too kind to it.
Today was a different matter.
I used the rubber end of a hammer to safeguard the end and with my 5lb dead blow mallet was able to finally start to get it to budge and release. A few more whacks and I had it out.
Other than the axle side being really dirty and grimey is till looks good.
However, the inner space has yet to come off. It is all soaking in solvent right now but I may need some heat to try and get it off. For all I know ti has been on 41 years.
The outer bearing came out easy but that’s basically just a plastic holder for roller bearings. I did have to use the slide hammer to pull out the outer bearing race.
I had repacked these back in 2018 so the grease was still very clean and looked like I had done it yesterday.
The inner bearing proved a bit harder to remove. Well. Not the bearing so much as the damn circlip that holds it in.
This bastard circlip coast me an hour trying to remove it. None of my clip pliers really would hold it. It also sucked that I could not approach it from a decent angle since the FI heat exchanger is closer to it than to a non-FI heat exchanger.
After much tried and error and slipping I was able to get a flat head under it and it finally popped out.
My deep 36mm impact socket with a 6″ extension on it, inserted into the housing from the outer opening made easy work of banging the bearing itself out.
Now. I had never touched this bearing before and did not know what to expect but it looks like someone must have repacked this prior to 2017. The grease is extremely clean and looks almost fresh.
It was nice to see that it was a German bearing made by SKF. However, I am not sure if it is original to Murbella or not. It has been obviously been repacked with clean grease. Or it is new. No idea.
It is as I said, it’ll all come out easy if I just use enough force.