Thanks for the tip on the rear bearings. Back to my front bearings..... I think I may use the dial to check the bearings end play BEFORE I pull off the badly worn rotor so see what the play is. If the grease is clean and looks OK, why bother with a repack. Just set it back to what it was?button up and go home.

a W123 with factory grease in the hubs would be a 40 year old grease. By this time the oil would have separated from the soap in the grease. I saw that on my W124 and the grease was only about 15 years old at that time.

Grease is cheap, a tow bill plus parts plus downtime is not.

I recommend repacking the front hubs every 5 years if they have not gone rumbly, its good insurance - specially if you drive in winter, this forum gets a lot of traffic for wheel bearing questions in the winter.

some shops who are not simply flatrating the heck out of everything and are not busy pushing flushes and throwing parts at the car actually do recommend such work, usually such shops are few and far in between and always booked.

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2012 BMW X5 (Beef + Granite suspension model)

1995 E300D - The original humming machine (consumed by Flood 2017)
2000 E320 - The evolution (consumed by flood 2017)

no way to use my HF dial indicator. The increment is .001 in. a half of an increment???!!!

I just remember I have access to my Mercedes Technical Date Passengers care manual.

Front wheel bearing specs for a W123

0.01-0.02 mm with a wear limit or limit value of 0.05 mm

Let us talk about the wear limit or limit value. Up to 0.05 mm is still a safe area. I have not read how Mercedes views it. Some would say at 0.50 mm you need to re-adjust it other would say only after it passes 0.50 mm. I don't know how Mercedes views it.

The clearances converted to inches:
.000393701-.000787402 inches wear limit or limit value .0019685 of an inch

If you are using an inch type dial indicator that reads to the nearest thousandth, you can indeed look at the needle/pointier and if it falls in the center between 2 of the one thousandth mark say it is .0005 provided you are looking straight at the dial indicator face.

You can also tell if something is more or less and falls between .000393701-.000787402 inches.

So, what is .000787402 close to. It is close to .0008. If you went by that the moment of the pointer/needle on a dial indicator that reads to the nearest thousandth and adjust to get more then 1/2 of the needle movement but less than a whole thousandth of movement.

If you want it to line up with the thousandths marks you can use the wear limit .0019685 of an inch and go for .001 as your target. .001 is well within the safe area of operation.

That is what I had to do because I had no meteric dial indicator the first 2 times I did the wheel bearing adjustment. Later I bought a meteric dial indicator.

I used dial indicators where I worked so I was familiar using them. The idea of eyeballing the needle even though the indicator does not have ten thousandth marks on it is not disconcerting to me.

On indicators with small dials, I have used a magnifying glass to see where the pointer/needle is clearly.

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84 300D, 82 Volvo 244Gl Diesel