[Col]

Obviously disregard the bits about captainlip, but the rest makes perfect sense to me.

Originally Posted by andy110m

Lip - I work for the market leading European Distributor of Bearings. We are the largest in Europe by any measure you care to make, turnover, number of employee's or size of authorised supply base. I know bearings.

I have tried all singing, all dancing bearings from a range of market leading manufactures, SKF, NSK and INA. I have always found the cheaper end of the market to be better performing than the high end. I've spoken to SKF technical manager about this. The reason is in our application the super tght tolerances are a disadvantage. Dirt will get in, thats a fact, anyone who's done any racing and taken the wheels off will see dirt and crap wrapped round the axle, so we have to live with that fact. In the high end product the dirt gets in the bearing and on to the raceway but because of the tolerances being so tight the ball can't ride over it, the ball and raceway are both damaged by being forced to travel over the dirt. Add to that the dirt can't get out and the problem is compounded.

I'd be interested to know what brand the bearings you're suppling are. Any brand worth its salt, or producing high quality ABEC5 bearing will brand mark them. Makes sense, they are proud of their product so they put their name on it. In my experience only cheap chinese manufactures leave the bearings unmarked.

I now use run of the mill SKF or INA bearings, dependant on what we've got in stock. The metal shielded ZZ type are more efficient because the shield doesn't touch both raceways only normally the outer. The 2RS, or 2 rubber seal, type does contact both the outer and inner race and as such slows the bearing. Just for interest the best thing we can have is C3 bearings. The interal clearance is increased to allow for heat expansion, normally seen in electric motors. Most of our bearings fall into minatures and this isn't done but in some cars they do use popular metric (popmet) bearings and C3 clearance is available.

I hope someone might find this useful.