Caravan wheel bearing repacks: how often, and what "done properly" looks like

Roughly 15,000 kilometres. That's the number most caravan manufacturers print on the servicing schedule for a bearing repack, and it's the number I ignored for the first two years I owned my 21-footer. I learned the hard way, on the Oodnadatta Track of all places, that a number printed for bitumen touring doesn't mean much once you've spent a week on corrugations.

I want to be precise about what "repack" actually means here, because I hear caravanners use it loosely to cover everything from a five-minute grease-gun squirt through the nipple to a full strip-down. Those are different jobs. Only one of them is a real repack, and it's the one that actually protects you.

What a proper wheel bearing repack involves

A genuine repack means pulling the wheel, removing the hub, taking the bearings out completely, washing every trace of old grease out of them in solvent, inspecting the rollers and races for pitting or discolouration, then hand-packing fresh grease into every gap in the roller cage before reassembly. It is not squirting grease into a fitting and hoping it displaces the old stuff. Sealed bearings with a grease nipple on the hub cap can be topped up between times, but that's maintenance, not a repack, and it won't tell you what's actually going on inside.

The other half of the job is setting bearing preload correctly on reassembly. Too tight and the bearing runs hot and fails early. Too loose and you get play in the hub, which shows up as a wobble you can feel by hand with the wheel off the ground, wiggling it at twelve and six o'clock. There's a right way to do this with a torque wrench and a specific tightening-then-backing-off sequence, and I'd rather a competent mobile mechanic or caravan servicing centre did it than have me guess in a driveway.

The interval that actually matters

Manufacturer service books usually say every 10,000 to 20,000 kilometres or annually, whichever comes first. That's a reasonable baseline for a van that mostly sees sealed roads and the occasional dirt access track to a caravan park. It is not a reasonable interval if you're running the Anne Beadell Highway or spending a week on the corrugated approach to the Birdsville Track. Sustained corrugations don't just shake grease loose, they generate heat cycles in the hub that break down grease consistency faster than time or distance alone would suggest. I've had a bearing tech tell me, only half joking, that a thousand kilometres of proper washboard does more damage than five thousand on the highway. I reckon that's about right from what I've pulled apart myself.

My rule after nine years of towing: repack before any big remote trip regardless of when the last one was done, and repack again immediately after if the trip involved more than a couple of hundred kilometres of serious corrugations. That's meant repacking my own hubs three times in a single year during a season that included the Gunbarrel and a Cape York run. Overkill for a grey nomad doing the East Coast Run, sensible for anyone pointing a rig at the Gunbarrel Highway or the Old Telegraph Track.

Reading a hub before it fails

You don't need a workshop to pick up early warning signs. After a driving day, before you've cooled your heels at the fire, walk around and touch each hub cap with the back of your hand. They'll be warm from normal operation, that's fine. What you're checking for is one hub noticeably hotter than the other three. A bearing running dry or with damaged rollers generates disproportionate friction heat, and an infrared thermometer gun (fifteen to twenty-five dollars from any auto parts shop) takes the guesswork out of it entirely. I carry one and check all four hubs at every fuel stop on remote legs. It takes ninety seconds.

Listen too. A failing bearing often introduces a low growl or grinding sound that changes pitch with wheel speed rather than road speed, which is the giveaway that separates it from tyre noise or a stone in the tread. If you catch that early enough you're looking at a bearing replacement at the next town. Catch it late and you're looking at a seized hub, a scored spindle, and potentially a wheel departing the van at speed, which is exactly as bad as it sounds and has ended more than a few Big Laps early.

Sealed bearings versus traditional taper roller

A fair few off-road vans now come with sealed, pre-greased bearing units that aren't designed to be repacked at all, you replace the whole cartridge when it's worn. There's an argument for these on remote touring rigs: less maintenance faffing, consistent factory-set preload, and no risk of a home repack done badly. The trade-off is you can't inspect the rollers yourself for early wear, and if one fails a long way from anywhere you're not repacking it roadside, you're swapping the whole unit, which means carrying a spare as part of your kit rather than just a tub of grease. I've run both. Honestly, for a van that lives on dirt more than half the year, I still prefer traditional taper roller bearings I can pull apart and actually look at. That's a minority view among the off-road van builders I talk to, most of whom have shifted their higher-end models to sealed units, but I like being able to see the grease colour and the roller surface with my own eyes before I trust a hub for another thousand kilometres of nothing.

What to carry, and what to check before you leave the driveway

Spare wheel bearings, races and seals for your specific hub, packed grease, a torque wrench you know how to use, and a hub cap or two, live in my recovery kit permanently, alongside the gear I've written about in the recovery kit that actually earns its place. They weigh next to nothing and take up a shoebox of space, and a roadside bearing failure without spares generally means a tow truck, which on the Birdsville Track is not a cheap phone call.

Before any trip longer than a week, especially one that touches dirt, I run the same short list: jack each wheel, spin it and listen for roughness or grinding, grab the tyre at twelve and six and check for play, and touch-test the hub temperature after the first proper drive of the trip. It takes fifteen minutes across four wheels and it's cheaper insurance than almost anything else you'll do before hitching up. If you haven't already got a pre-departure tyre routine locked in, it's worth reading alongside the pre-trip tyre check that takes ten minutes and saves your holiday, since tyre and bearing checks go hand in hand at the same wheel.

Where this fits in your overall service routine

Bearings shouldn't be looked at in isolation. If you're already booking in for brake magnet checks or electric brake servicing, that's the logical time to have hubs off and bearings inspected anyway, since the wheel's already removed. We've covered that side of things separately in the electric brake check nobody does, and if you're chasing a broader sense of what actually needs doing and when across a full year of touring, servicing intervals for a caravan on the road covers the wider schedule bearings sit inside.

None of this is complicated work. It's just work that's easy to defer because a bearing gives you almost no warning until it does, and by then the warning is a wheel wobbling on the highway or a hub too hot to touch a hundred kilometres from the nearest town. I'd rather spend an afternoon in the driveway with a torque wrench than find out the hard way, twice, which is exactly what it took me to actually start caring.