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Best of 2019: Removing A Pilot Bearing With Bread


Best of 2019: Removing A Pilot Bearing With Bread

Face some facts: you don’t have all of the answers, you don’t know all of the tricks, and you will spend your lifetime learning them so that you can (hopefully) pass on some lessons to a younger generation. Sounds like a common hack statement from a business meeting, but it has merit. Do you have a good story about Grandpa’s particular trick that worked when nothing else would? The knowledge of older generations isn’t often shared. It’s an actual problem for businesses and in the world of mechanics…you know, that strange area where the older crowd thinks the younger crowd doesn’t care about spinning wrenches and the younger crowd thinks that every last idea the older crowd has is fully antiquated?…those little grains of insight and knowledge are disappearing. How many of you would still crack an egg into a radiator to plug up a leak in an emergency?

The pilot bearing in a manual transmission-equipped vehicle can be a bit of a pain to remove, especially if you don’t have the pulling tool you need. There are many tricks that you can try out to force the bearing out. You can pack the input with grease and hammer away, you can pack the input with bar soap and hammer away, and now, thanks to ThunderHead 289, you can swing into your nearest convenience store, grab some bread and stuff that input full of carbohydrates and, you guessed it, hammer away! In all those situations, the action is the same: the grease/soap/bread will compress in behind the pilot bearing, taking the place of air, and eventually it will start to push the pilot bearing out. Sure, you’ll be cleaning out the input afterwards, but when you’re in a pinch and need that bearing out right now? Give it a shot!


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7 thoughts on “Best of 2019: Removing A Pilot Bearing With Bread

  1. Gary

    SIP, Standard Industry Practice in aerospace tooling, to use grease to heydralic out press fit bushing on machine tools. At Rockwell years ago, we bought the 125′ long (!) cnc milling machine from Beechcraft after they shut down the Starship program. We had to take out a bunch of press fit bushings on that mill bed because we had to locate others that would overlap into the same area the old one’s occupied. (They pay college Duh-Greed engineers to lay crap out like that, instead of just shifting it a few fractions of an inch). Anyway, pack it with grease, hammer and drift it out.

    1. john

      “Grease is the word…” John Travolta Now use a slice of bologna to get the bread out…on and on.

  2. Joe Jolly

    Wear gloves and safety glasses! LOL! I began my career in a transmission shop and used an old input shaft and a bronze hammer to hydraulic out the bearings and bushings. Grease or wet paper towels were the way to go back in the 70’s and 80’s..

  3. bob

    Grease is way faster and cheaper. Plus your not wasting food that some poor third world kid would love to have.

  4. Henrik

    Us old dudes sometimes know tricks that are gold. I learned the hard Way and used my imagination to solve problems in the shop. I still do it this Way. But the Young guys just ask for special tools or just stop and complain. They have no idea of how much you can accomplies with a little imagination and just doing it. That is why my boss likes me so much, cause i get shit done, and can fix almost everything with a wrecnch and a welder.

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