With all the other little tasks completed on the Scion, I decided to take on swapping out the old spindle on the car with the junkyard spindle, which hopefully has a good wheel bearing in place. The whole process is pretty easy, just removing the brake hardware, CV nut, strut bolts, speed sensor, tie rod end and ball joint. To start things off, the wheel had to come off. All the brake hardware, the caliper, pads, bracket all had to come off. With that little bit of business done, the speed sensor, held by one bolt, came off. The CV nut came off as this was rather easy with the impact wrench, as was the two big ass bolts on the strut. I had to beat on the tie rod end and the side of the ball joint to dislodge them as I wasn't using the fork, which would've resulted in damaging the boots. With all that taken care of, the spindle could come off. After removing the spindle, my quick test of rotating the hub confirmed my suspicion that the wheel bearing was shot. Rotating the unit had it scraping internally, showing that the wheel bearing was indeed failing enough to make the growling noise it was making the whole time. I'm not sure how this suddenly came to be but either way, the unit had to be swapped out. The junkyard unit did not make any kind of scraping noise or have any resistance that would be indicative of a bad bearing. I installed the junkyard spindle and started reassembling everything in reverse. With the reassembly of the junkyard spindle, the car made its test drive, up to highway speeds, with nary a sound from the driveline. With that, the junkyard spindle swap out was a success. I can now order some new wheel bearings and take my time swapping out the old unit in the driver's side spindle and hang on to the other junkyard unit, taking time to replace it when that side does eventually go bad and in return swapping out the wheel bearings. With this taken care of, the work is still not done yet. There is a matter of a power steering leak that has been seeming to get progressively worse as we went along, facilitating the adding of oil almost every day. Now it does appear that the boots are worn on the rack and pinion, which will be my first place to start. But I will have to slide under the car, unfortunately while its running, to see if I can spot any other leaks that may exist, whether a hose or the power steering pump. At least I can comfortably say that I'm checking the problems off the list on the car. More than likely I'll keep addressing problems, even when the problems haven't fully surfaced yet. I'll probably start replacing other parts that I have a good idea of their possible failing, just to cut future problems off at the pass.
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