Bearing buddies keep popping off!

[chucked]

Ive never heard of grease overheating anythig, unless it was on fire or being compressed for a few hundred or thousand psi

 

[Wenier]

Ive got bearing buddies on my trailer and just fill them up every few months, all the grease in the buddie is pushed in by the spring during the first reasonable drive due to the grease heating up and simple leaving out through the inner seal.

There are particular types of seals that you must not use bearing buddies on.

In saying how I have done it above it is actually filling the cavity between the bearings and the bearings themselves when doing this and the only way the grease can travel is from outter bearing to inner and then to the bottom of my ski when it gets flicked during a drive. I've had no overheating issues at all and it works fine.

 

[crisso]

Bearing buddies are designed to supply a slight positive inside the hub,on a hub with good seals.Trail a boat any distance and they warm up.Put the trailer in the water and you get an instant cooling down.This will create a slight decrease in air pressure.Without b/buddies,water gets drawn into the hub.WITH b/buddies,the slight positive pressure,compensates for that.Air inside the hub,allows for more expansion and contraction,compared to hubs that are totally filled with grease.Hubs on cars are not filled with grease and they run 20 plus thousand miles without a drama.Air inside hubs also disipates heat quicker than grease filled hubs.Understand that b/buddies are designed to keep a slight pressure inside the hub and not to blow water out of the hub.

 

[Strizzo]

if you run the buddies, you fill the hub full via the grease fitting, and the spring compensates for the small amount of expansion of the grease as it heats up. if you use dust caps, you have to pack the bearing by hand like you would on a car, leaving the air space in the caps to take up the expansion as the grease gets hot.

 

[igneous]

You may be putting too much grease in hub. When I first got my boat last yr., I replaced original bearings and put on BB's. Come back from first outing and one was missing, so I think I overgreased. Used blue (semi-permanent) loctite after that and no problems.

 

[scooper77515]

At this point, I think the fault lies in the hubs. These hubs were Dexter style, with a rubber cap in the end. There is a grease zerk that you force grease into, and it pushes clean grease from the inner seal out toward the outside bearing, and when the grease looks clean and new, you are done.

I don't work that way.

I pull the bearings, clean them, repack them, etc.

So, apparently, when I tried to put a buddy or cap in those hubs, they popped out, because they were formed to hold a rubber cap.

New hubs and nothing is moving, caps are staying one, all is fine and dandy.

So, if you had a rubber cap in the end, or if you have a grease zerk sticking out of the tip of the axle, re-think your hub. Replace with an aftermarket hub that comes with a cap, and not a plug.

 

[Ronsse610]

had the same problem as you, and after bunch of hours of taking bearing wheel hub and a bunch of other parts off and apart, my problem was the bearing pin. which holds the bearing from falling of but not the bearing buddy. use a smaller pin or a bigger cap