Steering knuckle greese

[jimmcld]

I just pulled the spindles off of our M37 to replace the inner greese seals. One of the steering knuckles was packed with greese while the other just had a little gear oil in it. Shouldn't these be oiled from the differential?

 

[zak]

From the manual

 

[Mike_L]

There is an inner oil seal that is supposed to prevent gear lube from getting out to the knuckles. May be that yours is deteriorated enough to flush out the grease. On the good side, it seems that you only need to fix one side and not both. Though it is usually good practice to do both sides whenever you do anything on axles.

It is covered in the TM 9-8031-2 manual.

 

[spicergear]

Use grease. If it had oil it was a leak.

 

[jimmcld]

Thanks to everyone who replied. I finally figured it out. It is not very clear in the manual, but there are bushings and seals on either side of the steering knuckle so that it is totally isolated from everything else. The gear lube has to go through two seals to reach the wheel bearings, but that's what happened.

 

[spicergear]

That's fairly common and the reason that some people think there should be oil in the knuckles.