93 lesabre front end problems

[galenw]

Hey guys:

I have some problems that hopefully you guys can point me in the right direction.

I am assuming I have a bad bearing in a front hub. There is a very bad humm coming from the front of the car at any speed (it seems to be worse when turning left ( I think) ). I am also having a problem with the brakes. When the pedal is first applied, there seems to be normal stopping for about a second and then the pedal goes almost to the floor and you have to apply quite a bit of pressure to the pedal for the car to stop. This has just started last week (so the wife says!)

I have the car up on stands and have taken the wheels off. The driver's side rotor, caliper, etc was very hot to the touch while the passengers side was not. Both axles seemed to turn about the same although it seemed to me that the drivers side did hang up a little about every two revolutions. The cv boots look fine (no cuts leaks etc.). There is plenty of pad left on both sides of the car and both sides of the caliper.

Is there a way to tell which hub is bad before I take it off? I sure don't want to take the wrong one off (especially when the hubs run about 140 bucks)!

While looking around, I also noticed that the bellows on the drivers side steering gear is all chewed up. The gear itself looks pretty good. Is there a way to just replace the bellows or should I look into changing the whole rack (ugh)?

Any thoughts or direction you guys can give would be most appreciative.

Thanks in advance

Galen

[Alibi]

Ok, the brakes: The squishyness sounds like a bad master cylander. New is about $40 and isn't too hard to replace as long as you bench bleed it first and then bleed all the brakes afterwards.

The components on the drivers side being hot... I'm guessing you've got something rubbing (quite possibly the bearing) making the noise and the extra heat. Remove the wheel and try to spin each bearing by hand. They should spin freely and spin a bit on their own if you give them a good launch. If one makes a noise or doesn't feel smooth when spinning, then that is probably your culprit.

As for the torn "bellows", that sounds like a torn CV axle boot. There is a way to put a new boot on it, but at this point the constant velocity knuckle has already been compromised if the boot is torn and the grease flung out. You'd be better off to replace the whole shaft ($70-100). It really isn't as hard a job to do as it looks.