How to Repack Trailer Wheel Bearings Before Towing Season

We’ve got Elkhart coming up, and Colorado right behind it. Before either one of those happens, all four wheel bearings on the trailer come apart. That’s the deal I made with myself back in spring, and September is when the bill came due.

So this is what a Saturday looks like when you decide to repack trailer wheel bearings yourself instead of dropping the rig at a shop. Our 2021 Alliance Paradigm 310RL, our driveway, and a job I’ve done before — except this time I did it a different way, and one part of it went sideways.

Why we repack trailer wheel bearings ourselves

The honest reason is the number. Doing all four ourselves saves us a few hundred dollars a season, and I say the real figure out loud in the video rather than rounding it in our favor here.

The better reason is that nobody looks at your rig as carefully as you do. When the drum comes off, you’re not just greasing a bearing. You’re looking at your brake shoes, your magnet, your backing plate, and the condition of grease that’s been sitting in there since the last time somebody cared. A shop does the job. You do the inspection.

Getting a fifth wheel off the ground without getting hurt

This is the part I care most about, and it’s the part most videos skip past in four seconds.

The hydraulic levelers get it up. That’s all they do. They are not what’s holding the rig while somebody’s arm is inside a wheel well. Everything after that initial lift is a floor jack under the frame rail, blocks, and steel stands — and there’s a specific reason we don’t put the jack on the axle tube if we can help it.

The full sequence is in the video. If you take nothing else from this post, take that one.

The Dexter rule I’d been getting wrong for years

I sat through the Dexter hands-on session at the 2026 Alliance RV National Rally, and I walked out having learned that one of the things my dad taught me is a good way to ruin a bearing.

It’s the kind of shortcut that’s been passed down in driveways for fifty years. It works, right up until it doesn’t. I explain what it is and why it damages the part you’re trying to save — and there’s a second piece of that lesson about what happens to your seal the moment it comes off, which changes what you buy before you start the job.

The part that went wrong

I bought a seal driver kit for this. Nice case, full set of sizes, felt very professional laying it out on the tailgate.

It cost me a seal.

What I switched to instead is something you almost certainly already have in your garage, and it worked on the first try. I left the whole failure in the edit — the crooked seal, pulling it back out, and the sound of me realizing what happened — because watching somebody get it right the first time teaches you nothing.

The tool I didn’t own

Rig on stands. Wheel in the grass. Drum back together. And then I reached for the socket to set the spindle nut and found out I’d never actually bought it — despite being told the size months earlier.

Deb went to AutoZone. I stood in the driveway and thought about my choices.

Measure that nut before the wheel comes off. That’s free advice and it’s worth about forty-five minutes.

Setting the nut is where bearings live or die

Everything up to this point is cleaning and grease. This is the step that decides whether the work you just did lasts a season or fails on an interstate.

There’s a torque number, and then there’s what you do after the torque number — and the order of operations matters more than the number does. A lot of the advice floating around online gets the second half of it wrong. We walk through the actual published procedure in the video, along with how to check your work before the wheel goes back on.

What you’ll spot in the background

If you’re the kind of person who watches the background instead of the hands, you’re going to notice something under there that wasn’t on our rig last season. Cross members running hanger to hanger, tack welded, part of a suspension job we had done that hasn’t had its own video yet.

That one’s coming in a couple weeks. Same with the Elkhart trip, which is a bigger job than the bearings — there’s a kitchen slide floor coming out, plus a stack of little things we’ve been writing down all season. The kind of things you live with until you finally get somewhere that can fix them properly.

The bearings were just the thing that had to happen first.

Watch the whole job

Start to finish, all four wheels, including the part I got wrong. Tools and parts are linked in the video description.

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