Bearings made of butter?

[Colm]

Just wondering have manufacturers of bottom brackets decided to make their bearings out various forms of dairy products . My relatively new steed ( eight months old and pampered... ask the wife ) has decided to replace the bb bearings with appears to sound like gravel.

Surely the bearings should last longer than this even with the winter conditions or are my expectations just to high .

[Martin]

went through two sets on the stumpy!


rust and weather the cause! not designed for Ireland is my conclusions!

[Colm]

Sounds like the bike and component manufacturers think we all live in california and would'nt know that there are four seasons.

[paddyobrien]

I've seen complaints about this on forums like singletrackworld but having said that i saw people at Mountain Mayhem last year cleaning their bikes using a pressure washer and pointing it directly at the bottom bracket, hubs, fork stanchions etc so i'm not suprised that they're complaining about only getting 2 months out of their bearings etc.


I think i got 2 1/2 years out of my first XT hollowtech BB so i thought that was not too bad.


You can get all sorts of creakign and grinding soudns coming from the BB which is jsut caused by dirt in the frame. If you try taking it out and cleaning out any muck thats in there, clean and regrease the threads and then refit it you may find its almost as good as new again. (not a promise)

[Colm]

Unfortunately I've done all the above, now saying that its a Truvativ system so

I wonder is the longevity a common problem with their systems... I reckon we should petition the manufacturers for our right to ride through as much shit as we want without financial consequences. MUCK SAVAGES UNITE!!!!!! ;-)

[Oisin]

You can get much better quality replacement BB bearings from these guys: http://www.enduroforkseals.com/


But you also need a special tool to install them in the BB cups which costs $110 so that kind of defeats the point.


For expensive tools like that which people would only need to use once in a while I wonder if it would be worth buying as a bit of club equipment that members could use? Would get enough use then to warrant the price.


Another useful tool is a bearing puller http://www.enduroforkseals.com/id197.html that costs $159 which makes it easy to replace pivot bearings in full sus frames and do all other kind of jobs like hub bearing replacement for hubs with cartridge bearings.