CE Smith Bearing Protectors w/ Covers for 1.985" Hub Bore - Chrome - 1 Pair

Video Transcript for CE Smith Bearing Protectors with Covers Review

Hey everybody, how's it going Today, we're gonna be going over the CE Smith Bearing Protectors with Covers. So here is what a standard grease cap looks like. It simply installs onto the end of our hub here. And what it's gonna be designed to do is to keep all the grease inside for our bearings inside from seeping out. It's also gonna keep water from or dirt and debris from getting inside the hub and causing damage. And here is what our bearing protector looks like.

So both the bearing protector and the grease cap are gonna do a great job of not only keeping the grease in, but also keeping foreign contaminants out. However, the bearing protector also doubles as an easy fill mechanism, which we can see using the included dirt cap. So normally we're gonna be checking the grease in our bearings at least once a year to ensure everything is nice and lubed up. Now, if you come into a situation where you don't have enough grease in your hubs, you can actually burn up, destroy your bearings, and possibly lose a tire in the process. So making sure you have adequate grease in your hubs is gonna be a pretty big deal, especially if we find ourselves to be towing frequently.

So normally in order to add grease or Chet grease inside our hubs, we'd have to remove the grease cap. I'm not sure if you've ever done this before, that's easier said than done. They can be removed, but most of the time if you end up destroying these things, getting them off anyways. So that's where the bearing protectors come into play. We simply install these the same as we would a normal grease cap, but the included zerk fitting is gonna easily allow us to add grease to our bearings and hubs before each trip, as well as at the end of the year, once we clean everything out and we need to fill them up completely.

It's gonna make this process extremely hassle-free. So there's a few different kinds of these bearing protectors. In order to choose the right one, we're gonna give you a couple of easy to find methods. The first method is gonna be the most exact methods and that's gonna be measuring. So what we're gonna need to do this, we can't, unfortunately, just use a tape measure, we do need some sort of caliper, whether that be digital or just a standard one.

So we can take one or two measurements to find the correct bearing protector. We can either measure the grease cap. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna be measuring the outer diameter of this lip here or the flange Simply gonna take our caliper line that up. It looks like this one is gonna be 1.99. So there's obviously gonna be some manufacturing variances here in regards to the tolerances but this is probably gonna match up great with that 1.985 option that we have displayed here. Because as we mentioned, there's a couple of different options for these depending on our measurement. So this is gonna match up great with this particular one here, the other measurement we can easily take is actually using the hub. So we're gonna be measuring the inside diameter of the hub here. So we're gonna use the opposite end our caliper here. And this one is gonna come out to 1.95. So again, it's gonna line up great with this 1.98 option. Granted not every caliper is the same and there's definitely gonna be some variances in your measurements, but we're really just looking to get as close as we can to the common size. So fortunately, if we don't have access to a digital caliper and we don't really see a need to buy one for other than issues, there is still another method. However, we do have to pull our hubs apart in order to verify the correct bearing protector using this method. Because we need to get our hands on the outer bearing here. So once we get the outer bearing out more often than not if we flip it around to the backside we're actually gonna see it's stamped. The part number for the bearing stamp into the cone here. So it is super fine print here but we can see the part number for this bearing stamped on there. That's L44649. This is a very common bearing size. So once we get that bearing number we can then use the compatible bearings that match up with the bearing protectors here. Those are all gonna be listed on the product page. The L44649 bearing matches up great with this 1.985 bearing protector. Now, as far as the installation goes process is quite simple. You're definitely gonna be doing this with your trailer on the ground but we have a nice little tabletop demonstration set up of the spindle. So we can show you how easy it is. We're first gonna start by assembling our hub. We're gonna take the inner bearing drop it inside the hub here. And then we're gonna take our grease seal. And we're gonna seat that in place using a wooden block and a mallet. So once we have our inner bearing and our grease seal in place we're gonna go ahead and insert our hub over the spindle, like so, then we're gonna take our inner bearing, we're gonna drop that down into place. Now we can do is we can take our castle nut here. Once we place our washer over there. Thread on our castle nut. And then at this time we're gonna want to tighten and loosen the castle nut to help us further seat the grease seal. But once we have that done, we'll go ahead and snug up the castle nut. Then we'll back it off just a hair a little bit. We don't want it too tight but we do want the hubs to sort of spin freely. A good way to check this is to see, tighten the castle nut until there's no side to side play in our hubs. But once we get that on we'll simply align up our cotter pin here. You're gonna bend that over to lock it in place. And then we'll finally install our retainer clip here. But once we get those things on we're ready to install the bearing protector. We'll just simply place the bearing protector over the hub here. We're gonna take a block of wood. They do actually make a specialized tool for this but we're gonna be using the one that you guys are gonna have access to a home. So place the block of wood over the bearing protector. So we don't want to hit this first. We don't want to hit this too hard for the first couple tries here cause we just want make sure we seat nice and evenly. So it's gonna be a little bit more difficult to do this on a table top, as opposed to when you just have the actual on the ground but the principle's the same. We're gonna give it a few lights taps to make sure it's seated on there evenly. And then we're gonna hammer it the rest of the way in until it's fully seated. So now we're gonna take our grease gun here and we're gonna simply build a hubs with grease using the zerk fitting here inside the bearing protector. So we're adding grease. We want to do the slowly, want to give it a couple of pumps and spin the hub, keep repeating that process. So it is kind of easy to overfill these hubs here using these bearing protectors because it's so easy to add grease. So in order to know when we have enough grease in our hubs here, cause again it is crucial that we don't overfill. So you don't blow out the grease seals. We're gonna simply look inside the bearing protector here. We should start to see some grease seep out around this black disc here. Once we do see that grease coming out. We know we filled our hubs correctly and we can stop adding grease. We would simply just repeat the same process on our other hubs. And then when we're done filling our hubs we'll simply take our cap here and just slide it over the bearing protector Just like that. And that's gonna do it today for our look at the CE Smith Bearing Protectors with covers..