Originally Posted by
FBinNY
In any case, you're greatly overthinking this. The question you need to ask yourself is what advantage do you hope to achieve with angular contact bearings. Without a material reason to try to out think the designers at White,there's no reason to assume that there's anything to gain.
Oh, I am certainly over thinking this, overthinking is my superpower. But the question about advantage is in fact what I am asking this forum and why I resurrected the thread. It seems the answer is that there is no advantage to be had, but my interest in exploring the question that I am seeking more durability.
By way of context, the reason I started exploring this is because in the two years I have had the T11 hubs, I have had to replace seized bearing cartridges twice. This compares to the four year old set of ultegra hubs that are as smooth as the day I got them (no rust or signs of other damage when I opend them up. They looked pristine).
Recently I saw this video
wherein the good people at Arts Cyclery say that my radial cartridge bearings are prone to binding up due to inability to to deal with axial loads. “Hmm” thinks me, “maybe if I get me some angular bearings, I would get more life out of them.” Jude at Sugar doesn’t seem to think my seized bearing issue is due to axial load, angular bearings don’t seem to offer better bearing performance (reduced drag, e.g.), and I take from this thread that perhaps there is no advantage to angular bearings even if its possible to use them. So its not clear to me why Jude uses angular bearings when servicing WI hubs, nor why my radial bearing seize periodically. But radial bearings are cheap andI enjoy wrenching so perhaps I will just keep replacing the radial bearings as needed. And next time I buy high end handbuilt wheels, I will go with Dura Ace hubs.