Hub bearings

[retro-rich]

Got around to repacking the hubs today.

They are Maillard Normandy luxe competition. The bearing were loose rather than caged.

I got some replacements from the lbs last week, however it appeared the front bearings he gave me were too large.

So an emergency trip to halfords as they are the only place open on Sunday, they only had the smaller size in the caged type, I've put them in and they appear to fit ok, (although I've not fitted the wheel back to the fork yet). Is it ok to replace loose bearings with a cage?

The back hub had larger bearings, I think I counted about nine per side, I could probably have got another one in but it would have been a tight fit, is it correct to leave a slight bit of spacing between the bearings?

Also the front cup and cone appears to have a bit of rust on the left side, I don't really want to be changing the hub now, I've cleaned it up the best I can manage, is the only effect of this a slightly rough feeling to the hub when turning?

When adjusting the cones, to get them so it felt there was no binding, the cones were fairly loose, enough to be able to turn by hand, is this ok? Obviously the locknut is tight against it.

Any advice welcome

 

[bm0p700f]

There should always be a bit of space when fitting loose bearings. The tenth will go in but that will leave the bearings unable to move. The rear bearings are proably 1/4"

The cone should be tightened by hand till it pinches then backed of a bit (1/8th of turn) the tighten the locknut. For solid alxes and wheel nuts the should be no play in the bearing at all and it should rotate freely. If there is any binding at all back of the locknut and losen the cone a tad and try again. For Q/R there should be a very small amount of play in the bearing with the locknut tight. When the skewer is on (try it out using a few washers to simulate the dropouts) the play should disapear.

I would take a trip down to your local bearing shop and order grade 25 bearings as thise you bought from halfrauds are probably grade 1000. If they are weldite or e.t.c they defo are. Grade 1000 has no place on a bike Buy 100 of the size's you need in grade 25 chrome, they won't go off!

Also if your hubs have caged bearings you can put loose ones in, it just a bit more fiddley. Have a magnet or magnetised screwdriver handy to pull out the bearing that has gone astray. Also I have found Weldites TF2 or similar cheap grease leads to less than smooth running (used the weldite crap twice and never again). I now use Rock n Roll Super web grease and grade 25 bearings or better and I have smooth hubs after a rebuild.

 

[retro-rich]

That's great, thanks for the advice.

Just to clarify, the original bearings were loose and I replaced with a caged set (on the front anyway, the rears were loose and were replaced with loose).

The grease I have used is plain old castrol LM, opinion seems to vary on which grease to use when reading around the web but it seems to do the job.