I have a set of OEM axles that I removed from my last R53 at around 90k miles, but the bearings are shot. Is there any way to rebuild these or to buy a replacement bearing set?

 

You can rebuild them but they are a real pain in the you know where, I did boots and will not do it again----next time I will replace the entire axle assembly. It is not worth the mess and aggravation.

 

I've already re-booted them before, and while I definitely agree that the re-booting process is miserable, I'm wondering about replacing the bearings inside the axles myself so I could make them spares. When installed, these axles had about 5" of "jiggle" in either direction, and made some unpleasant NVH at freeway speed..

I'm assuming that had I sent them in as cores when I replaced them last year, some company would have been able to rebuild them. I just want to try my hand at that too.

I have much more time and patience than I have money recently, and I'm just looking for little car stuff I can tinker with to keep me sane while I'm finishing classes for the semester. I have access to my university's tech shop, if any machining tools are necessary. I guess my line of thinking was that if the OEM axle is that much better in construction, it would be nice to have a rebuilt set of those on hand for when I fix this next R53 of mine.

 

We rebuild them all the time. You can ship them over and we'll do a rebuild normally about $300 each which will include new boots, clamps, grease, rollers repaired, needle bearings, yoke repair and so on as needed.

 

Hey Way!!! Thanks for the offer...unfortunately, not this time...this was more of a "can-I-make-something-out-of-nothing-while-bored-and-separated-from-my-MINI-until-summer" DIY project than something I could actually afford to shell out several hundred dollars for. I had a lot of fun rebooting the CV's last year before learning to identify the NVH of a failing CV axle and buying cheap aftermarket replacements. I even played with the needle bearings and got the collar (rollers?) off of the bearing while playing around with the bearing..

So the real question is...what company made (and what are the size/specs of) the OEM rollers, needle bearings, and how in all actuality does one repair a yoke...

 

Did you ever get an answer to your question about getting these bearings?

 

Just an update to my original post. I'm now almost at 190K miles on my original supercharger. A couple of weeks ago I decided to change the oil in it since I was going to be that deep into the front of the car anyway. There was still oil in the front and back reservoirs....but they were low. The gears all looked perfect. I filled it back up with fresh oil, and now it's back on the car again..still making 16psi of boost. Hopefully it will last a long time before I have to mess with it again.