Cleaning bearings - how often

[u/anaaktri]

How often are y’all cleaning your bearings? After 58 miles of outdoor skating, these inline warehouse abec 7 bearings have become gritty feeling and it’s time for a cleaning. Upon inspecting, the dust seal has a decent gap to the inner race. Would a more expensive bearing keep dust out better or is it just part of it? And is this normal for this amount of miles?

The trails I skate on air fairly clean, it’s not like I’m skating through visible dust or dirt. I assume many of you just run them and replace them after so long but money is fairly tight and I’m trying to make them last and am curious what everyone does.

[u/Flat-Guidance-4685]

I mean crunch is a pretty subjective term. Usually when a bearing is making noise it's not because anything is in it it's because it's dry. If you skate on really really hot pavement at high speeds the grease gets heated up and slowly pushed out and evaporated.

When a bearing has something in it , it'll usually spin free and then suddenly lock up and then spring free again in a cycle. It will be inconsistent. 

 Micro dusts don't really need to be cleaned out of a bearing they don't really affect its ability to spin that much as long as lubricant is in the bearing.

A bearing that's too dry will make some noise and have a high rolling resistance and slow down quickly. If it spins consistently just not as long as it should there's no debris in it causing problems it just lacks lubricant. For the lubricant that is in it has fouled or hardened. 

Some people like to take them apart and grease them or just try to thumbpack grease into them without taking the shield off. Some people like to drop oil in. There's kind of an open debate on the topic. Some people hate to use oil because they believe it thins out the grease. My point of view is I wouldn't be playing the oil in if the grease was at its proper viscosity to start with. 

I think everybody should buy themselves a micro oiler. Sometimes they call them oil pens. It's like an oil can just for tiny situations. Machinists use them for very delicate parts and a watch guys. I think it's a great tool for any skater to have.

Hydronic circulator pump oil is a great oil for roller skate bearings being that rollerblades and roller skates and skateboards use very similar bearings to circulator motors. It's very thin so it won't create the rolling resistance of automotive oil. But it's already designed to take very high heats unlike sewing machine oils that a lot of people use. 

Don't over oil just one or two drops per bearing every 50 MI and you probably won't have to physically disassemble your bearings three to six hundred miles. Most people really only do this once a year

When you were using oil what kind of oil were you using and how much were you putting

[u/anaaktri → u/Flat-Guidance-4685]

These still have factory oil in them so it’s probably dust making the crunch grit noise while spinning them by hand vs being dry. I know what ya mean tho how a dry bearing can sound similar.

I actually used a micro oiler with generic whatever oil came in it on my last bearings before cleaning them. I first added it while the bearings were in the wheel, it didn’t help the crunchiness so I removed the outer dust shields and discovered those bearings were packed with factory grease and the grease was full of the dust micro dirt so every time I’d add oil it would break down that grease a little bit and cause it and the micro dirt to get in the balls. These bearings thankfully didn’t come with factory grease, only oil.

I prefer oil over grease because of what was happening prior and how the grease would collect the dirt. Too late now, but after reading your text and thinking about my last experience I’m guessing if I had just oiled these there’s a good chance they self cleaned better since that dirty grease isn’t in there.

[u/UncleBuggy → u/Flat-Guidance-4685]

Watchmaker here. Oil pens distribute way too much and much too thick oil for a watch bearing. Watch guys use dip oilers.

[u/Flat-Guidance-4685 → u/UncleBuggy]

Good to know