sticky main tongue jack?

[crazyv]

Ok so tonight I noticed that the main crank seemed really hard to crank up and down. I could feel it sticking on each little groove. I opened up the cover and there was a TON of grease but most of it was not in the grooves of the actual crank...

Any suggestions? Should I just smear that grease back down into the grooves for a smoother crank?

[Jas]

I had this happen to my tongue jack. When I took it apart I found the ball bearing destroyed in addition to a lack of grease. If your bearings are intack, repack the bearings, slather everything in fresh ball bearing grease and back away slowly.....

to repack a bearing, put a dalop of grease in the palm of your hand and drag the bearing trough the grease until it is force out the other side, spin the beaing a couple of times and repeate. General pourpose grease at the auto parts store is fine for this application but if you want to upgrade, look at the synthetic "disc brake" bearing grease.

[crazyv]

oh dear - luckily for me I know what a bearing looks like - but um....where would I find them and how the heck do they come out?! YIKES. I think maybe I had better ask my handy neighbor today.

[pondlady]

I would expect they would be the same as repacking bearings on sailboat winches, a job I have done more than I like.

[Jas]

Part of what I do for a living involves bearings so here goes:
if you can get it apart, you can take the old bearing to an auto parts store like NAPA and they can find you a replacement usually on the shelf. if you find little steel balls in the grease the bearing is shot. There are some small numbers on the bearing race and usually a trade mark stamp that a seasoned parts counter rep should be able to identify. what you need to know is that the new bearing should match the old one. Lay them side to side and make sure they look the same. For this application all of the other bearing specs really don't matter. The part number may not be the same as there are several different bearing manufacturers that make the same size bearing. If they look the same, it will work.

here's a pic of a ball bearing. Yours will be the single row like the one shown to the front of the group:

[Jas]

on my tongue jack, all I had to do was hold the trailer up on jack stands, remove the jack and take the handle off. The handle is what kept the screw & bottom part of the jack from falling off. You can push the stub down into the jack body and it will fall to the ground with the lower half of the jack. hte bearing was a slip fit so I had to grab it and pull. grease the new one and the screw while in there and put it back the way it came off.