How to replace a Hub Seal for a Beetle/Porsche 356

(00:00) Welcome to Just Kampers. In this video, I'm going to show you how to remove and replace a rear hub oil seal. Now this oil seal is on Porsche Speedster, but it is exactly the same as the VW Beetle/T2 Split, as you can see i've already removed the rear wheel and the brake drum, to remove the brake drum you need to remove this center hub nut, now on the Porsche they're very tight so this is 400 foot pounds i believe, and on the beetle it's 217 so, you may need some help in removing this nut as you'll probably need somebody in the car with the vehicle on

(00:36) the ground, rear wheel still on. Remove the hubcap, then you remove the split pin and then you'll need a big bar, and you'll need to have the person with their foot on the brake and undo that hub nut. Now I can see that the oil has leaked past the seal and has run down the backing plate. Fortunately, oil hasn't spun all over the brake shoes. In some cases, when they leak particularly badly, it goes everywhere, and then you have to replace the brake shoes as well and remove everything and clean everything down but this is still

(01:06) fairly clean uh reason this seal has leaked i don't know yet but we're going to investigate that now the reason i found it leaking was upon inspection i found a small little drip on the back of the back plate as i was looking underneath the vehicle so then i was like why is that there so hence why the drum came off and now we can see that our seal is leaking so i'll give you a close-up as you can see the axle oil has just leaked past that rubber seal not 100 sure why yet it could just be the seal that's failed or the

(01:42) spring that's around the back of the seal falling off so the next thing we're going to do is remove that hub carrier i'm going to undo the four bolts that hold the carrier through the backing plate to the axle tube now they're 14 mil headed bolts and they're quite shallow so when you're on there with your ratchet you need to make sure that you're really square and you undo them nice and steadily if you find that they're really tight then use a longer bar and again steady the top of the bar as you undo it you don't want to

(02:12) come off of that nut and then ruin the face of it because it's very shallow so we're going to undo that there will be some oil and hopefully it's going to run past it's not going to touch our brake shoes obviously if your brake shoe is already ruined it doesn't matter just undo it let the brake come out you can drain the oil out of the transaction if you want to first i'm not too worried the other thing you can do is lift our axle up with an axle stand with the vehicle on the floor just to try and get it more level so we

(02:41) haven't got so much oil coming out i'm going to let the all drain out through there anyway it's not a problem and then we can top up afterwards so let's just check we can get these undone so they are fairly tight again i'm going to leave some pressure on here so we don't slip off yeah they're pretty tight okay [Music] next we're going to try and loosen this pub seal carrier now you can do that by rocking the back plate like so it should just gently come forward we're going to leave this place from there there goes that

(03:22) i'm just going to move that round so it's draining past our break shoes onto the floor that's fine so we'll let that go and then we can inspect to see why this is leaked i'm just going to use a couple of our bolts to hold our backing plate in position as we are still connected to our hard brake line we need to be careful not to move it too much we do have a little bit of wiggle room but our copper pipe is still bolted into our wheel cylinder so we must be careful we don't want to move it too much and break that brake pipe if you're not

(03:50) comfortable moving around with the brake pipe on there you can disconnect it and clamp off your rubber flexi holes to stop your brake fluid leaking and then you would have to re-bleed your brakes afterwards anyway so i'm just going to put a couple of these bolts in just to hold it in position so i can now get the rear o-ring out which is the seal which shields between the bearing and our seal housing so we'll see if i can move that up okay so that's our o-ring that goes around our back of our wheel bearing so we're going

(04:21) to replace that anyhow so to move our bearing retainer which houses our inner o-ring i'm just going to give it a little light tap around the face to try and bring it away from the wheelbarrow you don't need much it's just a little tap [Music] that should have yeah it's brought it away from the world area so i can pull that off and have a look that actually looks very dry in there and the o-ring looks very dry so it doesn't look like we've been leaking all there so we need a little bit of further investigation to find out where the oil

(04:54) was leaking from the bench as you can see there's like a seal holder with our seal in it and our special tool which is just the right diameter to fit around and sit on top of our seal and go through our seal holder so i'm going to give that a bit of a tap and get that knocked out and then we can have a look so with the seal now removed it actually looks really good and i think it was sealing really nicely around this face sort of around this face so i don't think that's our problem anyhow further inspection i did find

(05:28) this little divot here on the back of us our holder now this little divot may have allowed the oil to pass the o-ring on this nice bright face here the o-ring sits between that and the actual um back of the backing plate through the backing plate sorry and actually onto the axle and it seals the oil stops the oil coming from in here outwards now i think possibly the o-ring wasn't getting compressed into this groove and the oil was passing through here and dripping down here and yes it's at the bottom so the bottom

(06:07) of our seal holder which is where most of the oil was now as a possibility the oil was leaking through here and then getting picked up by the rotation of the drum and thrown around our seals it was a little bit misleading to start with i think um the other thing it could have well been leaking through the center of our oil seal so we're going to replace this oil seal anyway but belt and braces i'm going to gently polish this down to get rid of that little indentation because it's actually quite deep so it's going to take a little bit of

(06:37) polishing and then we'll have a nice face again for the o-ring to sit up against and hopefully stop the leak so using a flat surface and a bit of abrasive paper i was actually lucky enough to be able to polish out that horrible divot line without taking too much material off so it's literally just very gently kept going until we got rid of our divot line and as you can see now we've got a beautiful bright face and that will allow our o-ring to sit up nicely and seal now to put the seal in i'm going to push it in from behind now the reason being

(07:14) is that there's a lovely chamfered edge here so we're not going to catch the seal going in and damaging it at all if you try and put it in from the front it's got a real sharp edge so you could damage the side of the seal as we're pushing it in that way so i'm going to go in from behind like so just start off with my thumb so we can just start to put it in that's it there is a little tip you can use a little bit of brake cleaner which makes it slippery for a short period of time until the brake do it cleaner disperses and that might help

(07:51) you put your seal in you could also use a little touch of seal around the outside of the seal if you felt like it was necessary if there was a small amount of damage on our holder then that's what i would do then we do have this tool which is just the right size to fit snugly around the outside at the back of the seal without damaging it and then we can start to just gently tap it home so just gently work our way around okay we're nearly there i'm just going to bring it forward so it's almost flush with the front

(08:29) so what i've done i've pushed the seal through the back of the holder and it's now flush with the front and we know that that seals in nice and straight there's not going to be any problems with it being slightly uh off of straight line as it were now that's cool let's um let's get ready to put that back on the car i'm cleaning down with some solvent some brake cleaner you can get rid of all that gearbox all the left leaked out now it's not leaking first thing we're going to do put our washer on first must forget him

(09:01) he's got gone first he just literally goes on up against the wheel bearing next thing we have is our little o-ring so this small o-ring goes follow us on after that washer that sits in our little chamfer of our bearing retainer so again we have to make sure we get this around the right way so that chamfered edge needs to go inward so i'm just going to put a little bit of grease on this to help help it sit in place and then when that's pushed up against it hard it's not going to pinch our o-ring it's going to actually allow the

(09:36) o-ring to move slightly and sit in a nice a nice uh place and seal up just put a little bit of grease on that next one to go on is our big o-ring and this goes around the outside of our wheel bearing and goes through our backing plate and up against the actual axle um housing itself and then we put our seal housing back on that will actually squeeze between on that face there and through our backing plate onto our axle so let's get a little bit of grease on that too again the grease will just help it move in position and stop it getting pinched

(10:15) it's a little bit more tricky because we've got our back plate floating again at the minute so it's like a little bit of in just kind of pushing past the back plate so he's behind so we do that with a little tiny screwdriver so we're being super careful because we don't want to get that any damage to that o-ring at all just pushing through the back plate our o-rings in our correct position on a beetle you'll have a shape housing which will meet the shaped gasket now this gasket fits on the back and the other one fits on the other side

(10:59) of our axle that's on a beetle so we don't need these on our porsche a lovely clean face for that o-ring to squeeze up against now so here comes the fun bit we're going to undo the two blocks that are holding our backing plate in i'm going to wiggle this in position right way up and get some bolts in and we should be good to go you can see we have our inner o-ring just here in front of our washer at the back there it is there we've got our outer seal and obviously between here and the other side of our axle we've got our outer

(11:42) o-ring so what we've got left to do is to put our bearing retrain retainer stroke spacer in here time to torque our bolts up these are 32 foot pounds or 43 newton meters again nice and easy good now that's that talked let's get that bearing retainer on and get it finished so next is our spacer or our bearing retainer it's got a chamfer on the front and it has a slight chamfer on the rear as well so you could put a bit of grease on here and i'll just help it slide over our new seal ah just gently lovely pushes into place

(12:33) then once the drum goes on and our hub nut goes on that'll squeeze the bearing up nice and tight against our axle so lastly all we have left to do is tighten that hub nut luckily i've got my mate in the car to give me a hand he's got his foot on the brake and on the handbrake right there we ready to go so remember this is 400 foot-pounds pretty tight yeah there we go just put our split bin through it and we're all finished so that was how to remove and replace a rear hub oil seal for any more how-to videos visit justcampers.com or follow us on youtube or facebook.