How to Clean the Wheel Hub

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Nate McCullough on behalf of expertvillage.com. In this clip we are going to talk about the proper way to clean your vehicle's wheel hub. As you can see, we've got a decent amount of rust that has come off of our rotor in the hub; first we're going to blow that off there. For cleaning a hub, I like to use my screwdriver. Just take it and rake it around this portion here. You want to make sure and get all those goobers off of there. The reason why you want to clean your hub is that rust is going to fall down in a different position from where it was and it will get trapped between your rotor and the hub surface. You are also going to want to scrape off any of this rush that will come off. It doesn't have to be mere reflection. All you are looking to do is get the majority of the chunks off. The rust, the corrosion, is actually a swollen spot in the metal. If you were to put the rotor back on and your wheel back on without cleaning that, you may have enough rust behind there to pitch it out of alignment and that will cause a high speed vibration and pulsation in your brake pedal when you apply it. Being from Michigan, this hub is actually not that bad. Like I said it's not necessary to get out a wire brush or anything like that and go for a super polished look. You are just trying to get the majority of the chunks off of it. That's good for our hub surface there. What we are going to do is take and rub our screwdriver around inside here. Get any of that stuff that may get between our connection off. There you go, that's pretty much what you are looking for. No large chunks of rust sticking out. That is good enough for reassembly. "