88 with rear wheel beaing noise.
 

my old girl has 250K on her and has been loyal to me. I have a 3.5 inch superlift suspension lift with tru-tracs front and rear with 4:88 gearing and run 33x9.5's. I went to see about replacing the rear wheel bearings which I have never done anything with. The "wrench" started to talk about other possible problems "until he could really look at her" and rule out some sort of wear where the actual hole gets out of round and sometimes the rear axle housing needs to be replaced or "sleeved". any one know about this?

.... sounds like he wants a nice paycheck lol.. i just did my rear wheel bearings on my 4runner this last week, they were beyond toast.. like to the point of roughly 3/8s of an inch of play in them. it will take out the axle tube seal but i really doubt that it could damage the housing it self. im going to make my own jig to do my own bearings out of a old housing i have laying around. i still had to pay a hour of labor to have my done when i just brought in the axles.
you might shop around some more to, i called several differnt places when looking for my bearings and a shop to press them on. the local toyota stealership wanted like 500 for the bearings and to instal them on already removed axles, one pavement pounder 4x4 shop wanted 140 a piece for the bearings and seals and then 130 to install them.. then i called the actual real 4x4 offroad shop around here and they said theyd charge me an hour labor, $100 bucks each side for the bearing and seals.. and there good KOYO made in japan bearings.

its really not hard at all to pull the axles out of the rear end if you have never done it. i think total time i had into pulling and re-installing every thing maybe 2 hours. all you need is to drain the diff, remove the wheels and tires, pull off the drums, take a 10mm wrench to disconnect hte brake lines ( i put a plastic sandwitch bag with a rubber band wraped around it to preven excessive fluid loss, then remove the e-brake cable, take a 14mm wrench and remove the 4 axle retaining nuts off, then wiggle the brake assy. a bit and pull the axle out. make sure you dont loose the o-ring that seats on the out side of the axle tube, unless you are replacing with new. then i used the claw of a claw hammer to just pop out the axle tube seal (they make neat seal pullers but really.. i use what ever is handy lol .. tap in a new seal and then re-assemble as it came apart.

Would have to be really bad, like the bearings seizing up and spinning inside the housing. But replacement is not too hard:
- http://www.4x4wire.com/toyota/mainte...wheel_bearing/

Although sometimes you need a press to get the bearings out.