Greasing Gimbal Bearing

Willhound

When changing out my anodes the other day I noticed the grease fitting on the transom housing for the gimbal bearing  looked dry. I have my drives serviced every fall by my tech at same time as winterization and he normally greases it then. I thought maybe he just missed it, so went ahead and gave it a good half a dozen or 10 pumps. Did my drive coupler at the same time. Remembered later that I had the gimbal bearing changed as part of a drive overhaul last year and I know a lot of the new ones are sealed, non-greasable. I wasn't sure if that's what was installed or not, but it could explain why the tech didn't bother to grease it.
I'm supposing that it's better to grease if not needed than skip it and find out I should have, but is there any issue? Is the grease just going to bleed out on the back side? Going to cause any pressure issues on the seals?

Liberty44140

I had both gimbal bearings replaced last spring (2018) and the new ones are not serviceable. Most likely yours is dry because its still on the housing from the old bearing, but he doesnt grease it as it is useless now. Also as a side note the old couplers have two zerks so unless your coupler is new, you have two zerks on the coupler. One of my couplers is new and it only has one zerk.

Dream_Inn

Yep, agree with Liberty's comments.  No need to put grease in that is going nowhere.  A also have new couplers and realized last year that there is only one zerk now   I kept clicking the key over and finally though dang, is my timing just that far off that the other one isn't appearing!

Willhound

I'll have to check the coupler. Far as I know it's original so should be 2. It just happened that I was in there looking at other stuff and the one zerk was at TDC. I also tried to see if yhe steering pins had any but didn't see them?

69fastback

I'm pretty sure my coupler only has 1 fitting, but that probably got replaced when the transom assembly was replaced, so it may be the newer one. 

rasbury

So having replaced my gimbal bearing I have a thought based on that- the serviceable bearing outer ring has an alignment hole when you install it that matches up to the hole in the transom asy so when you pump it with grease it gets into the bearing. If your bearing was "sealed" , I'm thinking when you tried to pump the grease in, that passsge would have filled up pretty quickly- if you were able to pump a lot of grease then it's going somewhere. It might be a case of everyone assumes that the bearings today are not serviceable so they don't bother to look for the zert. I just did mine and had no problem getting a bearing I could grease. Just a thought...