I recently had a run of bad luck with my bearings on the front right wheel on my truck. Somehow all the grease disappeared, with resulted in metal on metal on the spindle, with welded the bottom outter..."track" of the bearings to my spindle. Through some hammering, chiseling and a little cutting I finally got the track off the spindle. But not before slicing into the spindle itself. I've since welded up the gash, grinded and sanded it back down as flush as possible. My question, would yall still recommend putting a new set of bearings on or should i replace the entire spindle? Also, would this have damaged anything inside the.."hub/disk"? I know nothing about this sort of thing so any help would be great

 

I would recommend a new spindle, front end steering components are not to be heated or welded the welding likely changed the metal characteristics causing a weak spot that could fail anytime. But that's just my .02

 

^ Agreed

 

I agree with Tan_1, you did weaken the spindle and the heat from welding probably distorted a few other areas. Just curious, did you tig weld it?

 

Yea. thats what i was afraid of. And yes, tig welded the crack up. re-sanded it down to where you can't even tell it was welded but none the less the harm was done originally when it got so hot from driving with no grease. Thats why i welded it to begin with, i figured it heat could harm it, its already screwed. So why not give it a shot at fixing it. If it was just a oem Ford spindle I wouldn't have went through the trouble, but its a lift spindle that'll be harder to replace so i wanted to give it every shot at salvaging

 

If you welded correctly , the weld itself is stronger than the base metal , it should hold up, but you may want to go easy on and I wouldn't reccomend it as a permenat fix