Hello to all
I have a 99 Ram 1500 quad 4wd 360. I have a problem in the LH front axle assy. The bearing in the housing on the inner side of the u-joint has perished. It has drawn the rotor into the dust shield and is binding up the front axle that when the car is lifted i cannot rotate the wheel without firm resistance. Can someone out there please advise me of a good source for parts and a tech area that can provide some reading on how to acomplish this. I think the front hub nut is around 175 ft lbs and the socket size is 1 3/4. That is some torque, i have an impact but none that will generate 175.
Any help is apprecitated and welcomed.

Sincerely,
Brian

 

I finally registered to this forum so I could reply to this because I know how frustrated I was! A real nice mechanic bent the squealers back on my pads, the pads wore down, dissinegrated and the rotor bit the dust To remove the rotor the hub had to come off which split it, removing the bearings and race from the hub hoping to reuse on the new rotor split the PLASTIC race. I would like to have a private word or two with the engineer(s) and purchasing staff that speced this design out.
I have several broken tools and scared knuckles from trying this earlier this year. I believe that although my truck has a different design (repaired 2 or 3 times under warranty but never retrofitted so now it's my problem, thanks Dodge) the cure is similar.
I found this forum while trying to figure it out sometime between March and April this year - there was a great post with pictures, descriptions and links to several other threads ofsimilar problems / different years / designs. The major differenceseems to be whether your rotor attaches to the front or back of the hub; either way it corrodes and heat seals together into one piece. Between these posts and some other shared knowledge I finally got it apart.
Bought my parts at NAPA which was the cheapest even before my buddy got me a deal - they have two price ranges / qualities and I went with the more expensive ones hoping never to do this again! The dust shields are dealer only and ridiculously pricedso I straightened out the rusty old ones as best I could.
Ithink I have a couple of photos somewhere - will be back soon.

 

Searching reminds me the biggest difference is between 1500 and 2500 / 3500.
Try this in the meantime:
https://dodgeforum.com/m_336524/tm.htm
https://dodgeforum.com/m_952191/tm.htm

The axle nut is 1 11/16. i bought a 1"dive socket for about $12, a breaker bar for about $30 and lengthened it with a piece of gas pipe (an old bumper jack would do it as well) and bounced my 200+ pounds on it for some time before it broke loose.

To break the hub out of the housing I bought the smallest bottle jack I could find and braced it against the frame and jacked - it of course then turned the wheels andI thought the power steering pump would break when I tried to hold it with that so put a bunch of fence post ends between the tire on the other side and a concrete wall - it eventually came off.

My picture filess are too large - let me know if you are stuck and I'll resize and post them. Looking at them reminds me that the last time the dealer fixed this they used an ABS hub on my non-ABS truck and just snipped the wires. At top dead center this is a ramp that you can get a chisel into and then pound it with a sledge hammer; it's hidden by the dust sheild so I din't find it until it was apart.

Good luck - now back to the turbo lag issue that brought me back here in the first pace.