Created: July 8, 2022
Length: 26:56
What’s up, guys? Today we’re going to show you how to change a wheel bearing on a Polaris RZR while using SuperATV’s Wheel Bearing Removal Tool.
Before you change the wheel bearings, you need to check them to see if they have any play. The easiest way is to grab both sides of the tire and rock rock it from side to side. Or you can grab the top and the bottom. If there’s a lot play you’ll be able to hear it.
This wheel bearing is absolutely toasted, so it’s most definitely time to change it.
[0:42] The first step to changing a wheel bearing on a RZR is to remove the lug nuts.
We’ve removed the lug nuts. Now I’ll remove the wheel and tire. Then we’ll remove our cotter pin from the castle nut. I like to use side cuts when removing the cotter pin from the castle nut—it just makes it a little bit easier.
We’ll pull this right out. I like to get this cotter pin as straight as I possibly can. That will make it come out much easier. I like to give it a couple taps, then come to the side of the cotter pin and bite it with the side cuts. Then pull down, using the castle nut as leverage. Just kind of bend it down.
[1:49] A lot of times you’re not able to reuse the cotter pin. As you can see, this one is not in great shape, so this one will get thrown in the trash. We’re going to put a brand-new one in it.
I don’t recommend ever re-using a cotter pin, unless it’s in excellent shape. It’s always a good idea to change them.
Now we’re going to grab a 27 mm socket or an impact. You can try to do this with hand tools but it makes this a little more difficult.
We’ll use our impact here to remove it, then set that aside.
[2:22] Next we’re going to grab an 18 mm socket and remove the upper radius arm’s hardware, as well as the lower radius arm’s hardware. Then remove the brake caliper.
We’re going to grab an 18 mm wrench and 18 mm socket and remove the upper radius arm bolt. Remove the nut and set it aside.
Then grab ahold of the rotor, pick up, and pull your bolt out. Now your radius arm is free from your knuckle. I like to go ahead and put my nut back on the same bolt that it came off of. That way you know exactly where it goes.
[3:08] Down here on the lower radius arm, we’ll put a wrench on the head of the bolt then remove our nut. Do the same thing here. Just relieve some pressure off the bolt and go back through the hind joint on the radius arm. That way our bushings do not fall out. Just let that hang down.
Then we’ll finish removing the brake caliper by removing the two 15 mm bolts.
Grab the brake caliper and slide it off. We’re just going to flip it out of the way. It is a braided steel line, so it’s totally acceptable for it to hang down like that.
Next we’re going to disconnect our sway bar link from our sway bar. Pull the hardware out and set it aside. What that’s going to do is pull straight back, like so. That will allow us to pull our trailing arm out.
Now we’ll pull that trailing arm out. Put your axle through and set the axle up on top of the trailing arm, just like so. You never want to let your axle hang. Letting it sit like this is acceptable.
[4:39] Another issue you can run into is, this is the hub. On the RZR, the hub is part of the rotor. It’s all affixed together. Sometimes the hub will get seized up inside of the bearing, especially if you have a worn-out bearing. As you can see, we have quite a bit of play here.
What I like to do when this happens is take a socket and go from inside of the bearing. Tap straight up so the hub slides out of the bearing. A lot of times if you do this it will take the end of the race off, which is completely fine because we’ll be changing the bearing anyway.
I’m going to grab a socket and show you what you have to do. I’m using the same 27 mm socket that we used to remove the castle nut from the axle. We’ll get it right in the center and then just tap.
[5:26] While you’re tapping, you want to make sure you don’t knock this onto the floor and knock a lug stud out or hit yourself in the foot. What I like to do is start it so that it’s moving and then lightly tap.
So we tapped on it a couple times and loosened it up. Again, you don’t want to smack until it falls off and hits the floor. You don’t want to mess up any lug studs.
That’s what I was talking about—the race might be stuck. A lot of times you can get a big pair of channel locks and pull this off. If not, you don’t want to damage this surface here because once the bearing heats up it gets stuck there and obviously that’s what happened here.
In a worst-case scenario you and one through and lightly cut on this to break it off. We’re going to put it in a vice and see if we can wiggle this off. If not, we may have to cut it off.
As you can see, we’re not vicing it on the studs. We’re vicing it on the actual hub itself. And it’s not even tight—literally just half a turn. Just enough o hold it in place for us.
[6:53] The first thing I like to try is to grab a pair of vice grips or channel locks and grab ahold of it. Try to pull it off. Like I said, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t.
In a worst-case scenario you may need a new hub. If it has a bunch of miles on it, once this race gets stuck on there, it absolutely turns into a pain to get off. IT has to come straight off.
We’re going to take these channel locks and try real quick to see if we can get it.
[7:41] If the first idea doesn’t work for you and you cannot get this race off of the hub, there are a few more steps you can take. The next one is a little bit safer than the last one. It’s to use some map gas.
We’re going to take this map gas and heat all around this race. We’ll get it as hot as we possibly can, then we’ll grab our channel locks and try to pull it off. If that doesn’t work we’ll show you the “last resort” process.
[8:28] Alright, let’s see if that’s hot enough. You want to be quick—you don’t want to let it cool.
I’ve tried a few different things here, on and off camera. I cannot get that race to move. So we’ve exhausted all efforts up to this point before cutting it.
You have one of two options at this point. You can either order a brand-new hub from Polaris, which is absolutely the safer way and that’s going to ensure that you have a good bearing surface here on your hub.
Or, if you absolutely need to get a bearing in your machine—maybe you’re broken down on the trailer or going riding soon and don’t have time to wait—you can take a burr bit. We’re going to cut slots in each side of this race to break it off the bearing surface on the hub.
If you’re not familiar with the burr bit, I highly recommend that you order a brand-new hub from Polaris and then just tune in to the rest of the video on how to change a wheel bearing.
If you’d like to do it this way, obviously you need to make sure you have the proper PPE and, as always, be safe.
[10:03] I’m going to take this burr bit and cut two slots right off the bat—one over here and then one directly across from it. Then we’ll try to knock this race off. If that doesn’t work we’re going to cut three slots in it, and I’ve never not had that work.
We’re going to work from the top down, going nice and slow. You don’t want to make contact with the hub itself.
Obviously, we haven’t cut all the way through yet. I tend to not try to cut all the way through the race. I try to break it, so I’ll try to get this as thin as possible. We’re getting to the point where it’s pretty thin. Obviously you don’t want to go through and make contact with the hub itself.
If you do make a little bit of contact, we can sand it down. It’s not horrible but obviously it’s not that great for the hub if you make contact with the burr bit.
I’m going to keep working this down but you’ll see here that I’m going to slow down a little bit and really focus on how deep I’m going, because we don’t want to penetrate all the way through. As you can see we got her pretty close here. It’s pretty tight.
It’s almost down to where it’ll be making contact. Again, if you do make contact, it’s not the end of the world. it’s not great for it—you can sand it down. But if you’re having to do this, I’d say the hub’s probably getting to the point where it needs changed.
[11:51] Again, this is a worst-case scenario. If you absolutely had to change it now, this is what you would do. I also like to cut at an angle–that way I can get a punch in there and try to break it when we get the other side cut.
Now we’re going to flip it. I like to go directly across from where we were previously, using the burr bit.
Now we’ll take a chisel or punch of some sort and try to smack this race and break it. It doesn’t look like we’ve cut through it just enough yet. We did move it, which is always a good sign, especially when it was frozen up pretty tight. As you saw earlier, it wasn’t wanting to move at all.
Now we’re going to keep burr bitting and working it down until we can break it.
[13:18] It looks freed up pretty well now.
Like I said, we’re getting her good and clean. That’s very important for the longevity of the bearing.
Now we’ll clean around the wheel bearing itself. Just take a rag and wipe it out. Usually, if it’s time to change a bearing, you’ll have a bunch of gunk in here. That’s what caused the bearing to fail. Sand, water, dirt, debris, anything that can get in that bearing is going to prematurely destroy it.
I’m wiping it out real good so we can see that the snap ring is exposed. Now you have your snap ring here and here. We’ll take our snap ring pliers and grab it.
This snap ring’s being a little bit of a bear. What I usually do is get it to where it is at this point. Pull one side up and kind of pull out.
[15:20] Now go through and try to work this snap ring out, all the way around. You don’t want to bend the snap ring too much. Once you get one side out, typically what you can do is take your screwdriver and pinch it together. Just keep working it around until all the tension is off of it, then you can peel it out of there.
It’s wanting to compress. What happened when it was installed, maybe it wasn’t all the way in there. There are multiple things that could have happened. One thing that really matters is that you get the snap ring out without damaging it.
Alright, now we’re going to grab our wheel bearing removal tool out of our kit. You’ll find an O-ring inside. You want to put that on the smaller side of this piece right here.
As you can see, we have it on there just like that. This is what’s going on the inside, up against the back side of the bearing. We’ll set that aside for a moment. You’ll also have two big washers and two nuts.
This piece right here is going up against the knuckle. This piece is cut to where it slides into this piece just like this, so it’ll be just like so. And that’s what you’re actually going to pull your bearing into.
[16:43] I like to take this piece and slide it into the back side, just like this. Once that piece is slid into the inner race of the bearing, we’re going to take our piece with the alter end.
As you can see, we have one of our big washers and one of our nuts started. It’ll slide through, just like this. On the other side we’ll take our big flat washer and slide it on, then run the nut all the way up, like this.
I like to hand tighten it. Then we’ll put a wrench on one side and an impact on the other and tighten it up. That’s going to pull the bearing through and it’ll drop the bearing right in here.
Alright, what I’m doing here is I want the least amount of thread exposed possible on the outside. That’s where I’m going to put my impact, so obviously our socket’s not going to be long enough if we have too much thread exposed right off the bat. We want the most amount of thread exposed on the inside.
[17:55] It should look something like this. We’re going to take our 24 mm wrench and, on the inside, our 24 mm impact or socket. Put the impact on the outside, then hold tight and hammer down.
Once you feel the pressure relieve and you have the bearing pushed out, take the nut off the back side. We’ll set that aside, then grab your washer and set it aside as well.
Next, grab your bearing and pull it off the O-ring. That’s exactly what it’s there for, to hold it. As you can see, we have an old, nasty, crusty bearing that was in our knuckle. So we’ll go ahead and discard this bearing. Just toss it in the trash.
The next thing we’ll look for, as far as a wear component that you may want to change on your machine, is the casting here on your rear knuckle. What I like to do is wipe it all down really good, get it good and clean. I’ll probably grab some Brakleen in a second.
What we’re looking for is deep gouging or marks on the surface. This one has a little bit but I would say we’re good to press a bearing into it. Next time we go to change a wheel bearing though, we’ll probably put a rear knuckle as well as a rear hub on this machine. Like I said, it has a lot of miles on it. It’s a 2018 model machine. It’s been rode hard and that’s just what happens.
[19:37] Now we have a brand new SuperATV bearing. You can pick these up off the website. It’ll fit the rear and the front of your Polaris RZR XP 1000 and XP Turbo.
We’re going to slide this bearing in. Make sure you can get it straight. You can kind of wiggle it around and you’ll feel when it starts to go in straight.
Alright, we got that bearing going in straight. Now we’ll take our tool, flip our O-ring around to the opposite side, and slide it in. The process is going to be exactly the same, just the opposite format. Grab our tool, run it through on this side, and make sure you have a washer again.
Run your nut all the way out to where it has a couple threads—that way you can get your impact on it, nice and easy. We’ll slide this all the way through just like so.
Then we’ll come to the back side and install it just like this. Slide it inside of the knuckle. Then take this piece and slide it onto the thread, making sure it centers up on that piece. Again, just run your nut down until it’s hand tight.
[21:21] Obviously, before you start pressing on this, make sure the wheel bearing is good and straight. Otherwise it won’t go in very well. Ours looks good so we’ll get our impact, saw, and wrench and send her on in there.
See how fast that is? We almost didn’t even catch it.
Now we’re going to take the nut off with the washer. Pull this piece out of the bearing. We’ll pull this piece out as well and set it aside. Then we’ll be ready for the snap ring pliers so we can reinstall our snap ring.
I like to start it on one side, just like that. I’ll grab the snap ring and squeeze it together, then pop it in there. Pull the trailing arm out and slide your axle through your bearing. Then we’ll grab the hub and slide it into place.
Take the washer that goes behind the castle nut. Start the castle nut on, then we’ll grab the brake caliper.
For our brake calipers, we’ll fully righten our brake caliper hardware. Slide our upper radius arm back into position. Grab the upper radius arm bolt and start the hardware. Grab the lower radius arm as well as the hardware, then put the nut on.
[24:19] We’re going to come up here to our sway bar link and reinstall the hardware. Fully tighten the sway bar link. Then we’ll fully tighten our radius arms.
Fully tighten the castle nut too. We actually tightened it up perfectly so it lines up with our cotter keyhole. Again, we’re putting a brand new cotter pin in. I like to bend it up and out of the way, then hold it down over top of the castle nut.
Double check the hardware on everything you previously removed. It looks good and tight. Now we’ll grab our wheel and tire and start our lug nuts. Always start the lug nuts before you tighten anything! I also run my lug nuts in with an impact, but before this machine leaves the shop today I’ll go back with a ratchet and double check to make sure it’s all tight.
[26:25] Alright guys, I hope this helped. That’s exactly what you have to do in any situation you may run into when replacing a wheel bearing using the SuperATV Wheel Bearing Removal Tool on this Polaris RZR XP Turbo or XP 1000.
For more information on this, be sure to give us a call or check us out online at superatv.com. Thanks for watching and we’ll catch you on the next one.
