Just changed my front tire this weekend and as I tried to balance it I heard a nasty grinding noise and felt quite a vibration as I spun it. I bought a bearing puller from amazon and quickly swapped out the bearings. (put the new ones in the freezer for a couple hours and they went in quite easily) sure enough one was bad at only 15800 miles. the new bearing are totally silent I was having a problem with my "ultra" emblem on the fender rattling this should have been my first clue instead of cranking up the radio. I'm also having a problem with the V inner error code so I ordered a new battery today. hopefully that will solve that problem.

 

If you bought bearings from the Harley dealer, I'd pop a seal off first time you get the wheel off and check the grease. Some of these Chinese bearings (actually, from any country now) don't have near enough grease in them. Those plastic seals come off easy with a tiny screwdriver, and just push back on. If there isn't much grease, clean out as much as you can and put in a quality synthetic grease from a major maker, like Shell, Mobil, or Amsoil. I suspect a lot of these early bearing failures would have lasted 100,000 miles with the right kind and amount of grease.

Did you pop a seal off the failing bearing and look inside? Just wondering how much grease was left in it.

 

I did pop the seal off and it had quite a bit of grease in it. I tried to clean it out by spraying wd40 in it because I wanted to see if an individual ball bearing failed or something else. there was a small burn mark on the inside and outside raceway in one spot. I may take it out to the shed and finish disassembling it today

 

diss-assembled the bearing. raceways and ***** were pitted. I guess I won't know if they weren't hardened properly or couldn't handle triple digit speed.................

 

Sounds like grease wouldn't have helped that one.

 

your lucky to havd gotten that many miles out of those junk bearings. mine failed at 2400 miles. do like Imold said and pop the seals off and pack some good grease in them, instead of the chinese crap that's in them now.