Originally Posted by
Robvolz
I like your thinking but didn't pursue that route for the following:
The cookie-making/ball-losing good-time happened after 8pm, after the harbor freight closed.
If the ball rolled off the porch, its in the front lawn somewhere, or in one of the potted plants along the stairs. Or under firewood. That's a lot of area to cover.
Merziac taught me to never use a magnet to keep your BBs from flying about because once magnetized, they pick up metal shards and the races don't last as long.
My bike frame-building friend Bob laughed at me when I retold the story. "What, are there little '<c>s' stamped on them?" and "don't you think BB technology has improved since 1974?"
PS: Sweetie's wheel is still short one.
This too, and also mainly the balls will stick to each other, the races, fail to rotate properly and wear unevenly along with the cups/races.
I would quickly get a full set of new higher precision from McGuire bearing or maybe CK and save the old ones for posterity.
Also while Bob's right, ball bearing tech has gone backwards with worldwide mass production but the lubrication and application tech has improved greatly so as to negate some of it.
Several years ago NASA commissioned Chris King to see about the feasibility of making very high precision ball bearings that had gone away and could find no one that would even try as most all suppliers had gone to lower standards.
CK got it done but it was too expensive so NASA figured something else out.