How did I manage this?

[SlimPickins]

So I swapped out my wheel bearings a couple years back and only have maybe 3k miles on them. Not long after I noticed growling/grinding from the front and finally got the chance to look into it this past weekend. Here is the pic of my driver's side outer bearing. You can see the cage is flattened at the 12 o'clock position. How the heck did I pull this off? Perhaps I dropped it while greasing it up prior to install but I don't recall doing that. Could it have been too loose after torquing to preload and then backing off? Damaged in shipping? Maybe. But I'd like to think I'd have noticed that when I was filling with grease. Any thoughts?

 

[Michael Brown]

Hard to say, but it definitely looks like it got dropped or impacted somewhere.

 

[Herbie]

How does the seat in the hub look? I wonder if this could have happened as it got pressed in?

 

[Alloy]

I've had bearings (assumed where dropped) out of the package like this. If the cage does bind the rollers then it is OK. If it does then prying the cage up with the screw driver fixes things.

What do the rollers look like?

 

[SlimPickins]

How does the seat in the hub look? I wonder if this could have happened as it got pressed in?

The hub and and race looked ok, nice and smooth.

 

[SlimPickins]

I've had bearings (assumed where dropped) out of the package like this. If the cage does bind the rollers then it is OK. If it does then prying the cage up with the screw driver fixes things.

What do the rollers look like?

The rollers in that spot looked ok but I went ahead and replaced the entire bearing, race and all, just to be safe.

 

[SlimPickins]

long screw on the retainer doodad? (longshot wild guess based on old and vague memories, sorry if it's dumb because of some part/fit/interference I'm not remembering right)

Ya know, I hadn't thought of that.. I did replace the OEM brass screws with hardware store hex heads as the originals were rather beaten up. I did try to get them as close to OEM as possible but I wonder if they stuck out a bit on the back end and caused this.. Great input Shovel.