Now that I am up and running and the car has 200+ miles on it I have discovered that I have a leaking seal on my drivers side. NO bearing noises and the case was recently filled with new grease lube. IS is safe to just replace a seal and not the bearings? I need to take the cover off anyhow to put a W27 differential cover on. I have no way of knowing how old the bearings are. I was TOLD that the Previous Owner "rebuilt" the rear axle but that might have just been him soda blasting and painting it.

 

Without knowing which axle you have, it's hard to recommend bearing replacement or not. On the early O-Type and 8.2" rears the seal can be replaced by itself, but on the 70 O-Type and the 71-up 8.5" 10 bolt the bearing has to come off to replace the seal.

 

If the axle type doesn't require pressing the bearing off and the bearing looks and sounds good , leave the old time quality in place. The quality of replacement parts is often lower than the old part.

Good luck!!!

 

Yup. 10 bolt 1970 rear end.

i made an appt to have this done. Sounds like took
much work to take on and very messy!

 

The seal is sandwiched between the axle flange and the bearing on that style rear. You can easily pull the shaft and have a shop swap the bearings and seals - we used to do that at the auto parts store where I worked in college. The store had a small shop in back where we turned rotors and drums, crimped hydraulic hoses, pressed bearings on / off shafts, and other small jobs like that.

 

YEP, It is the 712146 / 2146 seal headache AGAIN.... these wheel bearings are now tapered and require a .490 seal thickness BUT all the world of manufactures and NOW including TIMKIN are making them all .470 thick


SO the whole system is totally screwed.
Flip a coin... will see if they get it corrected.
Do not freak out if it happens again....
I do not even touch those rears anymore because of that issue.
I called Timkin to talk with techs and they were just totally NOT helpful and oblivious to what the specs were even suppose to be.
They did not know why it was changed as that is what it was....??? what does that even mean?
IF you can find the Mexico imported 712146 seal they were still .490
If you get them from Taiwan as everyone else does they will be .470 or less.
MEASURE the seal before paying for the item.
Good luck.
Jim
JD Race

 

I dropped off the car and they showed me the bearing set. The box Set was not labeled Timkin. The owner at shop knew what an O type was surprisingly. I looked at the bearings and they did not look Tapered at all. i think that is a good sign. I printed out a few pages of the thread linked above and drew a picture of how the bearing seals need to press all the way outward so they know to look for this problem at least. Should be done later.
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you did not have your phone??? you could have taken a picture. rats...