I recently saw a Foretravel maintenance guide and it listed rear axel oil and front hub oil changes. Think the rear axle was every year and the front hubs were every few. Wondering if this applies to my 1996 U295 and how often that is actually is done. Never seen any mention of this before. I regularly check the levels on my front hubs but have never replaced the oil in the rear axle or the hubs.
If that is the case I would change it now with a good synthetic,and monitor levels.
That might have been for a tag axle. I don't know of any time frame for a truck differential gear oil change. There are trucks out there with a million miles on them with no oil change.
"Changing the oil" in a wheel hub is a bit of a misnomer. My past experience with large truck hubs is that the majority of the oil is in the hollow part of the hub so even if you remove the outside sealing plate, you don't get much oil out. Unless you remove the hub or at least the outside bearing, the best you can do is exchange a small portion. As stated, tag and front hubs have oil baths, the drive axle is lubed from the differential. Guess you might consider changing the diff fluid every 75 to100k miles?????
And yet would you believe Foretravel has "change differential fluid" in the maintenance interval book as every 14K miles or 12 months, whichever came first? Same interval as steer and tag hub oil...
I wonder how many differentials had fluid changes they didn't need...
My Oshkosh chassis manual says differential oil should be changed at 100k miles so that's when I had it changed.
IIRC, Meritor drive axles using synthetic oil are considered lubed for life in Motorhomes. Although frequently servicing things doesn't hurt anything. I think I changed mine back in 13 or 14 the old looked like the new. However make sure the vent in the axle is open
The manuals that came with my '95 called for annual differential oil changes on pre '93 coaches and 100,000 mile changes on '93 and later due to a different vent on the later coaches that left less moisture into the differential.
I rarely buy new vehicles of any sort so a complete fluid change gets done right off. I've never serviced a rear end on a yearly basis outside of a couple in a Peterbilt that took on water while taking my boat to dry dock. Same time I never liked seeing third member lube jet black and a typical one like in the FT are not hard to service. All the while knowing that many a gallon of rear end lube is dumped out clean going by a 12 month schedule. I travel southeast to southwest and drive thru some desert and I just feel better knowing my fluids are more than adequate as far as attention goes.
Interesting - ours was a 2003, yet the Foretravel maintenance book showed that 14,000 mile/12 month change interval.