how bad is my front hub?

[Curtis]

2004, XLT, 4x4

I can hear a slight howling from the front drivers wheel. My wife cant hear it but she's not as tuned as I am. If the radio or AC is on you cant hear it. Cant hear it at highway, only around 30-55 mph
slight turns in the road will aggravate it a small bit.

The thing is, is that I wont get a chance to fix it this week and need to drive about 200 highway miles this weekend.

Is there any temporary fix for this? Spray grease on it or something?

 

[E.B. Cornburner]

The front (and rear) bearings are sealed units. If you're just starting to hear a growl, I'd be pretty confident in taking your trip with no concerns. We've had them that are so loud they'll drown out the radio!

They're actually not hard to change. The hub assembly unbolts from the knuckle, and one large axle nut is all you need to remove to get it off.

When I bought my '04, it had noisy rear wheel bearings that I told them I wanted done before I signed the papers. Instead, they offered to knock $1500 off the selling price and let me do it myself. Who'd refuse that deal? The bearings were only $122 each from Carquest and it's something I could easily do myself.
But to make a good story better, they ended up doing them at the dealership since they wrecked one checking it to make sure that's what was making the noise. They also put new rotors on the rear, and kept the $1500 discount still in the deal.
I came out great on that deal.

 

[Opera House]

I had fairly noisy ones on my 97 and believe these are the same design. When I pressed them apart there was no noticeable damage to the bearing. These don't have a lot of grease in reserve. If you want to experiment, you can remove the wheel sensor and pump in some grease through that hole. A zerk fitting with a little tape wrapped around the threads works. At a low pressure and feed rate, you can push old grease out through the seals. This might quiet it down. B aware that the old grease is likely polyurea based and this has a bad reaction with lithium. This may need to be done a couple of times to flush it all out. The amount of work to get at the sensor is considerable and the sensor may be damaged with pull out. My new bearings come with the sensor. If it were an older vehicle, this would be an interesting experiment.